The Ibsen play is more or less a game of chess; again observe the skilful moving of puppets on a board. His drama is specialised intellectually. It is interesting to keen minds, but not diverting, not so elementary as Shaw. _Peer Gynt_, however, is a mystery play, or could be taken as such; there are parts in it not only for the prime actors but for everybody in the theatre. The sad fact is that the theatre audiences are heavy. They are not quite so heavy in Russia as in England, for no one here considers his dinner as of any importance beside being at the theatre; and indeed if you are not punctual at the Theatre of Art you find the doors are closed and you cannot get in. But all the same the people are heavy, clinging to their seats as if in them they had found refuge. The moderns are not the Greeks. The minds and souls of the modern Russians are at the disposal of the Hierophant of the Mystery, but the bodies are more enslaved by gravity than lead. So, in the near future at least, there can be no active collaboration between audience and actors, no real disenchantment of that line of lamps separating the stage from the world. Perhaps in time choruses will be devised for audiences—even now in English music-halls where the people sing the choruses of the popular songs there is a witness of the possibility of the realisation of such an idea. Perhaps in time a part of the public may take part in dances or may march with banners and emblems, or opportunity may be given to public characters of the day to make their exits and their entrances, and make speeches not to be found in the books of words. But all this belongs to the thrice-interesting future, not to the tantalising present moment. All that the theatre is doing now is to put the dramatist in his place and give scope to the producer and the Master of Ceremonies. The Theatre of Art, the Moscow Free Theatre, and in London, as a beginning, Granville Barker’s theatre, are all working for a new, large, vital stage. In a sense it is futuristic work, for it takes no inspiration from the past, unless from ancient Greece. It regards all the work of the last few thousand years as makeshift. It will work out something worthy of Man, something noble and enduring. Then again Man will have a voice, and not that gay, confident, business cry to which Gorky has fondly given his ear. And that brings me back to _Besi_ (_The Possessed_), at which I was sitting with Gorky in front of me and the genial secretary at my side.