My dear McNulty

As to stage technique, there are several stage techniques; and people may be very clever in one or more of them without being good at them all, and even ¡ª especially in acting ¡ª know bits of them and not the rest. The beginning and end of the business from the author's point of view is the art of making the audience helieve that real things are happening to real people. But the actor, male or female, may want the audiencerice to believe that it is witnessing a magnificent display of acting by a great artist; and when the attempt to do this fails, the effect is disastrous, because then there is neither play nor great actins: the play is not credible nor the acting fascinating. To your star actor the play does not exist except as a mounting block. That is why comparatively humble actors, who do not dare to think they can succeed apart from the play, often given much better representations than star casts.

Many star actors have sulprisingly little of what I call positive skill, and all amazing power of suggestion. You can safely write a play in which the audience is assured that the heroine is the most wonderful creature on earth, full of exquisite thoughts, and noble in character to tile utmost degree, though, when it comes to the point, you find yourself unable to invent a single Speech or action that would surprise you from your aunt No matter a star actress at ¡̀250 a week will do all that for you She will utter your twaddle With Such an air, and look such unutterable things between the lines, and dress so beautifully and move so enigmatically and enchantingly that the imagination of the audience will supply mole than Shakespeare could have written.

This art of suggestion has been developed to an abnormal degree by the emptiness of the mechanical "well-made play" of the French school. And(you may be tempted to say, "If this woman is so wonderful When she is nlaking bricks without straw, what heights would she not reach if I were to give her straw in abundance?" But if you did you would be rudely disillusioned. You would have to say to the actress: "Mere Suggestion is no use here I don't ask you to suggest anything I give you the actual things to do and say. I don't want you to look as if you could say wonderful things if you uttered your thoughts I give you both the thoughts and the words; and you must get them across the footlights." On these conditions your star might be dreadfully at a loss. She might complain of having too. Many words. she would certainly try hard to get in her old suggestive business between the lines; to escape from the play; to substitute a personal performance of her own for the character you wanted to make the audience believe her to be; ancl thus your trouble with her would be in direct proportion to her charm as a fashionable leading lady. The success of the Dublin Abbey Street. Theatre was due to the fact that when it began none of the Company was worth twopence a week for ordinary fashionable purposes, though some of them can now hold a London audience in the hollow of their hands. They were held down by Yeats and Lady Gregory ruthlessly to my formula of making the audience believe that real things were happening to real people. They were taught no tricks, because Yeats and Lady Gregory didn't know any, having found out experimentally only what any two people of high intelligence and fine taste could find out by sticking to the point of securing a good representation.

Now as to your daily business in the theater. It will be more laborious than you expect. If before you begin rehearsing you sit down to the manuscript of your play and work out all the stage business; so that you know where every speech is to be spoken as well as what it is to convey, and where the chairs are to be and where they are to be taken to, and where the actors are to put their hats or anything else they are to take in their hands in the course of the play, ancl when they are to rise and when they are to sit, and if you arrange all this so as to get the maximum of effect out of every word, and thus make the actors fecl that they are speaking at the utmost possible advantage ¡© or at worst that they cannot improve on your business, however little they may like it¡©and if you take care that they never distract attention from one another; that when they call to one another they are at a due distance; and that, when the audience is looking at one side of the stage and somebody cuts in on the other, some trick (which you must contrive) calls the attention of the audience to the new point of view or hearing, etc, then you will at the first rehearsal get a command of the production that nothing will shake afterwards. There will be no time wasted in fumbling for positions, and trying back and disputing.

When you have put your actors through an act for the first time in this way, go through it again to settle the business firmly in their memory. Be on the stage, handling your people and prompting them with the appropriate tones, as they will, of course, be rather in the dark as to what it is all about, except what they may have gathered from your reading of the play to them before rehearsal. Don't let them learn their parts until the end of the first week of rehearsal nothing is a greater nuisance to an actor who is trying to remember his lines when he should be settling his positions and getting the hang of the play with his book in his hand.

One or two acts twice over is enough for each preliminary rehearsal. When you have reached the end of the first stage, then call "perfect" rehearsals (that is, without books). At these you must leave the stage and sit in the auditorium with a big notebook; and from that time forth never interrupt a scene, nor allow anyone else to interrupt it or try back. When anything goes wrong, or any improvement occurs to you, make a note; and at the end of the act go on thestage and explain your notes to the actors. Don't criticize. If a thing is wrong and you don't know exactly how to set it right, say nothing. Wait unti] you find out the right thing to do, or until the actor does. It discourages and maddens an actor to be told merely that you are dissatisfied. If you cannot help him, let him alone. Tell him what to do if you know if not, hold your tongue until it comes to you or to him, as it probably will if you wait.

Remember that when the "perfect" rehearsals begin, the whole affair will collapse in apparent and most disappointing back-slidings for at least a week as far as the long parts are concerned, because in the first agony of trying to remember the words everything else will be lost You must remember that at this stage the actor, being under a heavy strain, is fearfully irritable. But after another week the words will come automatically; and the play will get under way again Remember (particularly during the irritable stage) that you must not tcll an actor too much at once. Not more than two or three important things can be borne at one rehearsal; and don't mention trifles, such as slips in business or in words, in a heart-broken desperate way, as if the world were crumbling in ruins. Don't mention anything that doesn't really matter. Be prepared for the same mistake being repeated time after time, and your directions being forgotten until you have given them three or four days running.

lf you get angry and complain that you have repeatedly called attention, etc, like a schoolmastel, you will destroy the whole atmosphere in which art breathes, and make a scene which is not in the play, and a very disagreeable and invariably unsuccessful scene at that Your chief artistic activity will be to prevent the actors taking their tone and speech from one another, instead of from their own parts, and thus destroying the continual variety and contrast which are the soul of liveliness in comedy and truth in tragedy. An actor's cue is not a signal to take up the running thoughtlessly, but a provocation to retort or respond in some clearly differentiated way. He must, even on the thousandth night, make the audience believe that he has never heard his cue before.

In the final stage, when everybody is word perfect, and can give his or her whole mine to the play, you must watch, watch, watch, like a cat at a mouse hole, and make very well-considered notes. To some of them you will append a "Rehearse this"; and at the end of the act you will ask them to go through the hit to get it right. But don't say when it doesn't come right. "We must go on at this until we get it, if we have to stay here all night" the schoolmaster again. If it goes wrong, it will go wronger with every repetition on the same day. Leave it until next time.

At the last two rehearsals you ought to have very few notes all the difficulties should have been cleared away. The first time I ever counted my notes was when I had to Produce Arms and the Man in ten rehealsals. The total was 6oo. That is a Minimum: I have run into thousands since. Do not forget that though at the first rehearsal you will know more about the parts than the actors, at the last rehearsal they ought to know more about them (through their undivided attention) than you, and therefore have something to teach you about them.

Be prepared for a spell of hard work. The incessant strain on one's attention (the actors have their exits and rest; but the producer is hard at it all the time), the social effort of keeping up everyone's spirits in view of a great event, the dryness of the previous study of the mechanical details, daunt most authors. But if you have not enough energy to face all that, you had better keep out of the theater and trust to a professional producer. In fact, it sometimes happens that the author has to be put out. Unless he goes through the grind I have described, and which I face with greater reluctance as I grow older, he simply bothers and complains and obstructs, either saying that he does not like what the actors are doing without knowing what he wants instead, or at the first rehearsal expecting a perfect. Performance, or wanting things that can't be done, or making his suggestions ridiculous by unski]lful demonstrations, or quarrellillg, or devil knows what not.

Only geniuses can tell you exactly what is wrong with a scene, though plenty of people can tell you something is wrong with it. So make a note of their dissatisfaction; but be very careful how you adopt their cure if they prescribe one. For instance, if they say a scene is too slow (meaning that it bores them), he remedy in nine cases out of ten is for the actors to go slower and bring out the meaning better by contrasts of tone and speed.

Never have a moment of silence on the stage except as an intentional stage effect. The play must not stop while an actor is sitting down or getting up or walking off the stage The last word of an exit spcech must get the actor off ~he stage He must sit on a word or rise on a word; if he has to make a movement, he must move as he speaks and not before or after; and the cues must be picked up as smartly as a ball is fielded in cricket. This is the secret of pace, and of holding an audience. It is a rule which you may set aside again and again to make a special effect; for a technical rule may always be broken on Purpose. But as a rule of thumb it is invaluable. I once saw a fine play of Masefield's prolonged by half-an-hour and almost ruined because the actors made their movements in silence between the speeches. That does not happen when his plays are produced by Granville-Barker or by himself.

Remember that no strangers should be present at a rehearsal. It is sometimes expedient that strangers, and even journalists, be invited to witness a so-called rehearsal; and on such occasions a pre-arranged interruption by the producer may take place to affirm the fact that the occasion is only a rehearsal. But the interruption must be addressed to the mechanical staff about some mechanical detail. No direction should ever be given to an actor in the presence of a stranger; and the consent of every actor should be obtained before a stranger is admitted. The actor, of course, is bound to the same reticence. A stranger is a non-professional who is not in the theater on business. Rehearsals are absolutely an sacredly confidential. The Publication of gossip about rehearsals, or the disclosure of the plot of the play, is the blackest breach of stage etiquette.

I have tumbled all this out at express speed, as bcst I can do for you out of my own experience; in reply to your innocent question about technique I hope it is intelligible and may be useful.

1) George Bernard Shaw: The Art of Rehearsal; a Privute Letter to an Irish Colleague in Response to a Request for Advice and Inforrnation. New York: Samuel French, 1928. Copyright, 1928, by Bernard Shaw. By permission of the Public Trustee and The Society of Authors.