"Владимир Набоков. Эссе о драматургии (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

the author has of an audience; as soon as he sees it as a pink collection of
familiar faces the play stops being a play. To give an instance, my
grandfather, my mother's father, an exceedingly eccentric Russian who got
the idea of having a private theatre in his house and hiring the very
greatest performers of his time to entertain for him and his friends, was on
a friendly footing with most of the actors of the Russian stage and a
regular theatregoer. One night, at one of the St. Petersburg theatres, the
famous Varlamov was impersonating someone having tea on a terrace and
conversing the while with passersby who were invisible to the spectators.
The part bored Varlamov, and that night he brightened it up with certain
harmless inventions of his own. Then at one point he turned in the direction
of my grandfather, whom he espied in the front row, and remarked, quite
naturally, as if speaking to the imaginary passersby:
"By the way, Ivan Vasilich, I'm afraid I shall be unable to have
luncheon with you tomorrow." And just because Varlamov was such a perfect
magician and managed to fit these words so naturally into his scene, it did
not occur to my grandfather that his friend was really and truly canceling
an appointment; in other words, the power of the stage is such, that even
if, as sometimes has happened, an actor in the middle of his performance
falls in a dead faint or, owing to a blunder, a stagehand is trapped among
the characters when the curtain goes up, it will take the spectator much
longer to realize the accident or the mistake than if anything out of the
ordinary happens in the house. Destroy the spell and you kill the play.
My theme being the writing of plays and not the staging of plays, I
shall not develop further what really would lead me into discussing the
psychology of acting. I am merely concerned, let me repeat, with settling
the problem of one convention, so as to fiercely criticize and demolish all
the other minor ones that infect plays. I will prove, I hope, that
continuously yielding to them is slowly but surely killing playwriting as an
art, and that there is no real difficulty in getting rid of them forever,
even if it entails inventing new means, which in their turn will become
traditional conventions with time, to be dismissed again when they stiffen
and hamper and imperil dramatic art. A play limited by my major formula may
be compared to a clock; but when it comes out hobnobbing with the audience,
it becomes a wound-up top, which bumps into something, screeches, rolls on
its side and is dead. Please note, too, that the formula holds not only when
you see a play performed, but also when you read it in a book. And here I
come to a very important point. There exists an old fallacy according to
which some plays are meant to be seen, others to be read. True, there are
two sorts of plays: verb plays and adjective plays, plain plays of action
and florid plays of characterization--but apart from such a classification
being merely a superficial convenience, a fine play of either type is
equally delightful on the stage and at home. The only thing is that a type
of play where poetry, symbolism, description, lengthy monologues tend to
hamper its dramatic action ceases in its extreme form to be a play at all,
becoming a long poem or full-dress speech--so that the question whether it
is better read than seen does not arise, because it is simply not a play.
But, within certain limits, an adjective play is no worse on the stage than
a verb play, though the best plays arc generally a combination of both
action and poetry. For the time being, pending further explanation, we may