From that
moment he had the "black and white" fever badly. Acting for a time
seemed hardly to interest him at all. When his interest in the theater
revived, it was not as an actor but as a stage director that he wanted
to work.
What more natural than that his mother should give him the chance of
exploiting his ideas in London? Ideas he had in plenty--"unpractical"
ideas people called them; but what else should _ideas_ be?
At the Imperial Theater, where I spent my financially unfortunate season
in April 1903, I gave my son a free hand. I hope it will be remembered,
when I am spoken of by the youngest critics after my death as a
"Victorian" actress, lacking in enterprise, an actress belonging to the
"old school," that I produced a spectacular play of Ibsen's in a manner
which possibly anticipated the scenic ideas of the future by a century,
of which at any rate the orthodox theater managers of the present age
would not have dreamed.
Naturally I am not inclined to criticize my son's methods. I think there
is a great deal to be said for the views that he has expressed in his
pamphlet on "The Art of the Theater," and when I worked with him I found
him far from unpractical. It was the modern theater which was
unpractical when he was in it! It was wrongly designed, wrongly built.
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