HOW A PLAY IS PRODUCED
stumblingly, hurriedly, pours out the text of the “eagerly awaited novelty.” When an actor has read his part, even if it is only three pages from the end, he gathers up his things and makes off. No one appears to be at all interested in how the play will end. And at last, when the final words are spoken, there is a silence, a dead silence in which the play is weighed up and judged by its first interpreters.
“What clothes am I to wear?” ejaculates the heroine of the play, breaking the heavy silence. Meanwhile the dramatist reels out of the theatre convinced that never before in the history of the world has anyone written such a hopelessly rotten, piffling play.
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