Lucian the Dreamer by J.S. Fletcher

Lucian's tragedy ran for precisely seventeen nights. The ‘attempt to revive Tragedy on the lines of pure Greek Art' was a failure. Everybody thought the poetry very beautiful, but there were too many long speeches and too few opportunities for action and movement to satisfy a modern audience, and Harcourt quickly discovered that not even magnificent scenery and crowds of supernumeraries arrayed in garments of white and gold and purple and green will carry a play through. He was in despair from the second night onwards, for it became evident that a great deal of cutting was necessary, and on that point he had much trouble with Lucian, who, having revised his work to the final degree, was not disposed to dock it in order to please the gods in the gallery. The three weeks during which the tragedy ran were indeed weeks of storm and stress. The critics praised the poetry of the play, the staging, the scenery, the beauty and charm of everything connected with it, but the public yawned. In Lucian's previous play there had been a warm, somewhat primitive human interest -- it took those who saw it into the market-place of life, and appealed to everyday passions; in the new tragedy people were requested to spend some considerable time with the gods in Olympus amidst non-human characteristics and qualities. No one, save a few armchair critics like Mr. Chilverstone, wished to breathe this diviner air; the earlier audiences left the theatre cold and untouched. ‘It makes you feel,' said somebody, ‘as if you had been sitting amongst a lot of marble statues all night and could do with something warming to the blood.'

In this way the inevitable end came. All the people who really wanted to see the tragedy had seen it within a fortnight; during the next few nights the audiences thinned and the advance bookings represented small future business, and before the end of the third week Harcourt had withdrawn the attempt to revive tragedy on the lines of pure Greek Art, and announced a revival of an adaptation from a famous French novel which had more than once proved its money-earning powers.