Indeed, the theatrical atmosphere of London at that time was in its usual perpetual state of stuffiness. There was not even a beneficent society then such as we now have in the Pioneer Players, whose theatre (if one may so symbolise it) is the charity house for emancipated dramatists. Ibsen’s _Doll’s House_ had been produced in London just before the nineties’ epoch began, and, like anything new in popular art over here, raised the hue-and-cry. Then, too, the big ‘star’ curse, which Wilde himself so justly spurned, was permanently settled on our own insular drama like a stranglehold on the author.
Outside England, in the big art world of the continent, Schnitzler was beginning in Vienna.[22] Maurice Maeterlinck, in Belgium, had begun[23] too the drama of expressive silences which came to light in Paris. There were Sudermann and Hauptmann in Germany; Echegaray in Spain; D’Annunzio in Italy; Ibsen and Björnstjerne Björnson finishing their work for the Scandinavian drama; while the playwrights of Paris were, as always, feverishly fabricating all sorts of movements, as when Paul Fort, a boy of eighteen, founds in 1890 the Théâtre d’Art. But what was going on in England? Pinero’s _The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_, Wilde’s _Salomé_, and his light comedies, together with stuff by Henry Arthur Jones, Sydney Grundy, etc., represented the serious drama. The critics were perturbed, as they generally are. The musical comedy and its singing, pirouetting soubrettes deluded the populace into the belief that it had a great drama, when all these spectacles should really have been housed in London in spacious tearooms for the benefit of that multitude which is fond of tinkling melody and teapots. There was not even in London a single Überbrettlbuhnen, as the Germans mouth it, where those who love beer could go to hear poets recite their verse _à la_ Otto Bierbaum, let alone little theatres where what we so dolefully term the serious drama could be played.
Even, too, in those days, the newspaper critics, muzzled by the business department, which has never any wish to lose its theatrical advertisements, said little, with a few honest exceptions like Bernard Shaw. Max Beerbohm, when he took over the critical work of Shaw on _The Saturday Review_ was obviously unhappy. English theatres rapidly became as elaborate and as pompous as the Church Militant in its palmy days. They kept growing in size. In London, indeed, the small theatre never had its boom. Indeed, the nineties was the age when the big theatres were being built to fill their owners’ pockets and the men of the nineties themselves (be it for whatever reason you like) did not produce a single play.