THREE LANCASHIRE PLAYS The Game; The Northerners; Zack By Harold Brighouse London: Samuel French, Ltd. Publishers 1920 [Illustration: 0007] PREFACE |In another age than ours play-books were a favourite, if not the only, form of light reading, and the novel, now almost universally preferred, is the development of the last century. But a writer of plays should be the last person in the world to resent the novelist's victory, for plays are written to be acted, and reach a full completeness only by means of the collaboration of author with producer, scene-painter, actors and, finally and essentially, audience. The author's script bears to the completed play a relationship similar to that of an architect's plan to a completed building. Architect's plans, however, are not unintelligible to the layman, especially to the layman who is not devoid of imagination, the layman who is ready to spend a trifling mental effort and to become, be it ever so little, expert. And so with printed plays, those ground-plans of the drama. There must have been in the eighteenth century, a larger percentage of the reading public than obtains to-day that was expert in reading plays; plays were thought--you can find ample proof of it in the Diarists--easier reading than the novels of Fielding, Richardson and Smollett. Perhaps the comparative brevity of a play was, even in those unhurried days, a point in its favour; certainly the play-reading habit was strong and one likes to think that it is not lost. To read dully the script of a spectacular play is desolating weariness, but the same script read with sympathetic imagination becomes the key to fairyland, and from an armchair one sees more marvels than ever stagecraft could present. There are abominable limitations on the stage; producers are tedious pedants; but the reader mentally producing a play from the book in his hand looks through a magic casement at what he gloriously will instead of through a proscenium arch at the handiwork of a merely human producer. Play-reading, in fact, obeys the law that as a man sows so shall he reap; a little trouble, rapidly eased by practice, leads one to a great deal of pleasure.