We arrive at 7.45 to find that we alone of the whole audience
have been left out of the secret as to why Lord Algernon is to be
pushed off the pier.
For melodrama, unlike the more fashionable comedy, gets to grips at
once. It is well understood by every dramatist that a late-dining
audience needs several minutes of dialogue before it recovers from its
bewilderment at finding itself in a theatre at all. Even the expedient
of printing the names of the characters on the programme in the order
in which they appear, and of letting them address each other frankly
by name as soon as they come on the stage, fails to dispel the mists.
The stalls still wear that vague, flustered look, as if they had
expected a concert or a prize-fight and have just remembered that the
concert, of course, is to-morrow. For this reason a wise dramatist
keeps back his story until the brain of the more expensive seats
begins to clear, and he is careful not to waste his jokes on the first
five pages of his dialogue.
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