The Repertory whose "note" is the poetic play will probably evoke no local drama, because, until we get the village Repertory, local drama is the drama of the modern town, wherein the stuff of poetry exists, if at all, only as a forced revival of folk-lore. Anything can be great poetry to the great poet; one speaks here of the average playwright, the observer of his fellow man in a provincial town, seeking his medium of expression in drama; and such a man is unlikely to find it in the poetic play or to find encouragement and inspiration from a Repertory where poetic plays are visibly preferred. It is almost to be said that Miss Horniman's Company and the Birmingham Repertory Theatre stand for rival theories of the drama, but not quite; they have too much, including Shakespeare, in common.
Local drama is too important to be left so specially in the hands of Miss Horniman and the "Manchester School." It is important for the localities and important, too, for London; London is quite as ready to be interested in good plays about people in Aberdeen or Halifax as in plays about people in New York, but the New York author lives in a city where plays are produced and the Aberdeen author does not. The stimulation of local drama is possible only where a local producing theatre exists; the education of a dramatist is unfinished until he has heard his lines spoken and watched his puppets move. Drama in the capitals is standardized to some half-dozen patterns which alter slowly and, failing the local producing theatre, what is the provincial author to do but to suppress his originality and to write plays, in hopes of London production, as near as he can make them to one of the approved current designs? It is said that were it not for the continued influx from the provinces, London would die out in three--or is it two?--generations; and if that is true of life, it is true also of drama, and the plain duty of those who control British Drama, the Napoleons of the theatre, is to dig channels whereby healthy provincial blood may flow to London to revitalize its Drama.
This, which means that Sir Alfred Butt ought to seek out a number of intelligent producers and endow them in provincial Repertory theatres to work without interference from above, but always with the vigilant eye for that byproduct of a rightly inspired Repertory, local drama, is a simple matter of commercial self-interest, on a par with the action of the magnates of scientific trade who endow research not out of love of science, but in the expectation that they will be able some day to exploit profitably the resulting discoveries. So might Sir Alfred Butt exploit local authors discovered by the producers of his far-flung Repertories. The theatre is either a business or a gamble, and in the hands of men like Sir Alfred Butt it looks less like a gamble every day. Enlightened business self-interest would look a little to the future, to the fostering of authorship in provincial towns, to the establishment of many Repertories.