Page:Plays by Jacinto Benavente - Third series (IA playstranslatedf03benauoft).pdf/20

 plot conceals the mainspring of the action, which in the ultimate analysis is entirely dependent in this drama of double planes upon subjective elements for its significance.

As drama is feeling, not fact, emotion, not thought, it must perforce sink into the unconscious mind. In plays whose nature is wholly superficial, the action merely repeats the sense of the dialogue, and the curve of emotion is a simple one, complicated by no intellectual embarrassments. If the functions of dialogue and action are identical, however, clearly one must be superfluous, and the ultimate dramatic form be either pantomime or the literary closet drama. Gordon Craig attacks the dilemma, assuming drama to be primarily sculptural, a thing quite apart from words, and to express it his followers have sought to create a symbol, which shall be the drama as a presence, made manifest ocularly upon the stage. As conceived also by Benavente, drama is three dimensional, by its very nature incapable of being written; it is the setting over of something against something else progressively before the eye. Yet it is an unwritten action which is in constant flux, not a symbol or a series of tableaux sinking into pictorial art. The error of the exponents of the new stagecraft lies in the fact that they seek to extract from externals, from the mere trappings of a play, what is the very breath of its being, to be imparted at birth only by the playwright himself. A good play cannot really be read. Although a performance may be visualized from the printed page, the effect of the performance cannot be felt; too many imaginative and constructive processes intervene. Yet these effects of the unwritten action are precisely those in which true drama lies. The dramatic action, the unwritten action which is plastic, which lies behind the plane of language, is taken by Benavente to be the vehicle of his under plot—an unwritten action for an unwritten plot. The action in its purest form thus becomes the instrument of the subjective plot, which is the heart of the play. To disengage the action, to surprise its situations and effects, endowing them with emotional intelligibility of their own through coherence of mood, is to open up new reaches of the theatre. Mood lends itself clearly to independent development, yet