" Perhaps
he was thinking of the elephant. The manager had a property elephant
left over from some other play which he had produced lately. There it
was, lying in the wings and getting in everybody's way. I think he had
left it about in the hope that I might be inspired by it. At one of
the final rehearsals, after I had fallen over this elephant several
times, he said, "It's a pity we aren't going to use the elephant.
Couldn't you get it in somewhere?" I said that I thought I could.
After all, getting an elephant into a play is merely a question of
stagecraft. If you cannot get an elephant on and off the stage in a
natural way, your technique is simply hopeless, and you had better
give up writing plays altogether. I need hardly say that my technique
was quite up to the work. At the critical moment the boy-hero said,
"Look, there's an elephant," pointing to that particular part of the
stage by which alone it could enter, and there, sure enough, the
elephant was. It then went through its trick of conveying a bun to its
mouth, after which the boy said, "Good-bye, elephant," and it was
hauled off backwards.
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