Real Conversations

Abstract

W. A. … I am sure that if you had stuck to the non-musical stage, the non-musical public would have stuck to you. But I do think — pardon the pertinacity of my optimism — that if you were now beginning your career, you would find the circumstances more propitious to serious work than you did in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies. It was you yourself — was it not? — who complained in those days of the tyranny of ‘the young girl in the dress-circle’. Well, the young girl in the dress-circle has — shall we say grown up? — in the past twenty years.

While still a student, William Archer (1856–1924) wrote leaders for the Edinburgh Evening News. His travels in Scandinavia prepared him for an important mission in England: the popularising of Ibsen and Strindberg. He mounted an influential pulpit as the dramatic critic for the World, and subsequently reprinted his reviews in five volumes; he was a prolific journalist, and wrote much that still lies buried in the pages of numerous periodicals. He travelled widely, dabbled in spiritualism, and wrote one very successful play, The Green Goddess (1923), the plot of which he claimed he had received in a dream. He was a good friend of George Bernard Shaw, and advanced the cause of the New Drama in significant ways. He was often compared to Arthur Bingham Walkley, The Times critic, but not always favourably because he tended to be more harsh than Walkley in his judgements. Real Conversations, one should understand, is deliberately fashioned as an artistic rendering of the personalities whom Archer interviewed, but it is often quoted trustingly, as though the dialogue had been transcribed from some sort of sound recording.