Namn enligt folkbokföringen: Ervine, St. John Greer
Födelsedag: 1883-12-28
Avled: 1971-01-24
Kön: male
Nationalitet: Northern Ireland
UK
Födelseort: Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK
Dödsort: London, England, UK
Bostadsorter: Dublin, Ireland
Yrken: theatre manager
playwright
novelist
critic
Organisationer: Royal Dublin Fusiliers (WWI)
Abbey Theatre
Priser och utmärkelser: James Tait Black prize (1956)
Kort biografi: Saint John Ervine, in full Saint John Greer Ervine, (born Dec. 28, 1883, Belfast, Ire.—died Jan. 24, 1971, London, Eng.), British playwright, novelist, and critic, one of the first to write dramas in the style of local realism fostered by the Irish literary renaissance.

Ervine’s best-known plays are Mixed Marriage (first performed 1911) and the domestic tragedies Jane Clegg (1913) and John Ferguson (1915). In 1915 he became associated with the Abbey Theatre. After World War I, Ervine settled in London and was a drama critic for The Observer. He wrote such books on drama as The Organized Theatre (1924) and The Theatre in My Time (1933). Later plays included such comedies as The First Mrs. Fraser (1928), a rousing London success; Robert’s Wife (1937); and a reactionary play on nationalization, Private Enterprise (1947).

Ervine also wrote biographies of Salvation Army general William Booth, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw. His novels include Francis Place, The Tailor of Charing Cross (1912) and Alice and a Family (1915).

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Recensioner

How to Write a Play av St. John Ervine

[From the Introduction to Bitter-Sweet and Other Plays by Noël Coward, Doubleday, Doran, 1929; reprinted in A Traveller in Romance, ed. John Whitehead, Clarkson N. Potter, 1984, p. 28:]

Mr St. John Ervine published a few months ago a little book called How to Write a Play. Mr Ervine is a dramatist as well as a critic and his book is pithy and sensible. It is a work that any writer for the theatre can study with profit. He has exploded the fallacy that there is something mysterious in dramatic technique. Ponderous tomes have been written on the subject by people who did not know what they were talking about. It is evident that people who have no feeling for the theatre will find it very difficult to write a play, just as people who have no ear will never understand music, and I think it may be admitted that to write a play requires a specific gift. It is not a very exalted one, for it can exist without intelligence or originality (one of the most distinguished dramatists of the last generation had the mind and the education of a bartender and wrote notwithstanding clever and charming plays); I think it would be better to call it a peculiar knack. I suspect that the whole secret of dramatic technique can be told in a sentence: stick to the point like grim death. But I mention this book of Mr Ervine’s now because he has some interesting things to say about dialogue and especially about Mr Noël Coward’s. It is in his dialogue that Mr Coward has shown himself something of an innovator, for in his construction he has been content to use the current method of his day; he has deliberately avoided the epigram that was the fashion thirty years ago […], and has written dialogue that is strictly faithful to fact. It does not only represent everyday language but reproduces it. No one has carried naturalistic dialogue further than he. Mr St. John Ervine attacks it. He finds it commonplace and dull. […] He contends that the dramatist should ‘heighten and lengthen and deepen the common speech, and yet leave it seeming to be the common speech.’

[…]

When the characters and the theme allow, as in Hay Fever, the naturalistic dialogue can produce a masterpiece in miniature. But I have an impression that Mr Coward has gone as far as anyone can go in this direction. A blank wall faces him. There is less difference between Mr Ervine and Mr Coward than Mr Ervine seems to think. One seeks to reproduce dialogue; the other to represent it. I wonder if here too you do not come upon a blank wall. I wonder if the current fashion to be slangy and brief and incoherent has not blinded the dramatists to the fact that a great many people do talk grammatically, do choose their words, and do make use of expressions that on the stage would be thought ‘bookish’. It has seemed to me that during the last twenty years or so the increase of reading has affected current speech. If Mr Ervine read a shorthand report of his own conversation over the luncheon table he would be surprised to find how ‘bookish’ it was. If he spent an evening in a public house in Lambeth he would be surprised to discover how unusual were the words and complicated the phrases, learnt from the Sunday papers and the films, he would hear from the people standing around him. The present mode of dialogue debars the writer from introducing into his play educated people who express themselves in an educated way. It may be true that the English are a tongue-tied people but are they so tongue-tied as all that? Listen to the conversation of barristers, doctors, politicians, parsons, and you will find that they express themselves quite naturally in a way that on the stage would be called absurdly literary. Stage dialogue has been simplified out of relation with all life but that of the cocktail bar. It seems to me a great loss.… (mer)

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WSMaugham | Dec 16, 2016 |

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