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by Robert Montgomery
Theatre Arts
February 1955
The atmosphere to be dispelled is one which has, carelessly and thoughtlessly, been built up for the last thirty-five years. It is an atmosphere of fear, an atmosphere of despair, an atmosphere of futility. We live our lives in the shadow of one ominous fear after another. When the titillative qualities of one fear have been exhausted, a new one is brought to the front page of our newspapers. It's little wonder that the outlook today is universally bleak.
Yet the future is not as black as it is being painted. It is conditioned, to be sure, by the manner in which we approach it. When that approach is made in an attitude of hopelessness, it is bound to prove less than enticing. But must we approach the future with an attitude of hopelessness? Must we continue to toboggan down this never-ending descent into fear?
I say no.
I say there is no need for it and I say we are doomed if we can't rein ourselves up sharply, turn our course and approach the future from a more realistic point of view.
I say--and with emphasis--that the realistic approach embodies one enormously important element: hope.
If we have no hope for the future, we have no future. If we have no hope for the future, we are negating the present. If we have no hope for the future, we are denying the past.
The people--the only people--who can provide the unique kind of leadership required for such a change of course, a leadership which does not ostensibly lead, are the creative people. The duty, the burden, the opportunity falls to them, because, in a frantic era, the creative groups are the only ones who have the time to think deeply enough, to observe dispassionately enough and to give guidance realistically enough. It falls to the creative groups, essentially by default, since the industrialists and the politicians are too busily involved with the machinations of their own creation to find the time to think, to observe, to guide.
Yet, in undertaking this task, I am not suggesting that creative people must band together, form committees and elect officers to lead us out of the wilderness. their leadership must not and cannot be a conscious leadership. Whatever movement they contribute to must be a suggestive movement. It must move in terms of its own value and its own validity, not as a matter of pressure.
I have in mind a friend of mine, an artist, who has always been--in terms of art--a revolutionary. He has been a fighter all his life and now, at fifty-seven, he is still a fighter, still a revolutionary. He has given up painting now. He has given it up not becasue he is mellowing, not because he is tired of fighting the battle he has always carried on in his own art, but because he has found a more important battle. He has given up painting because, he says, it is now more important for a person like himself to learn to find hope.
It is important for creative people like this to find hope because, having found it, they can impart it to the rest of us. They can reach out to us as no other group can.
It is awfully easy for a painter, a sculptor, a writer--any creative person--to do something in his field that is revolutionary and destructive. It is much harder to be revolutionary and constructive.
It is obviously the contructive revolutionary who is the better man, who can be the great man. It is the constructive revolutionary who must give us guidance now.
In saying this, I am not shouting into a vacuum. I am not calling for the impossible. I am simply stating a fact of our times. The constructive revolutionary is already with us. He is beginning to happen, and recognition of these beginnings is coming from the most auspicious sources.
It is necessary only to look to the Nobel Prize awards to see that the most discerning minds of our times are aware of the importance of the turning of creative minds toward hope. One award went to a man who is possibly the greatest living example of hope and faith in action--Dr. Albert Schweitzer. Another went to Ernest Hemingway for his novel The Old Man and the Sea. This is a particularly significant selection. It is a definite symptom of our times, for fifteen years ago Hemingway would have been accused of being corny if he had produced this novel. Yet a more hopeful book was never written by a more worldly man. It is, in essence, a story of victory, not--as it has sometimes been interpreted--a story of defeat.
In looking to creative people for this form of leadership, I am, of course, including the creative people of the theatre. Currently it seems to me that they are in the theatrical doldrums. Theatre people haven't yet reached out to find out what life is all about. I think they eventually will. I have the greatest faith in the creative people of the theatre. They'll smell out the need of our time, and as they do, their reaction to it will be inspiring.
Joseph Hayes is an instance of a man coming into the theatre who is bringing some of this sense of direction with him. It is Hayes' The Desperate Hours, of course, which has given me occasion to come back to the theatre after many years devoted to films and television. His play attracted me because it brought me face to face, in my position as director, with some technical challenges that I found interesting--the need for working with six stage areas on which there could be no focus by artificial means, by lights or by a lack of lights. But beyond that, it attracted me because of its exploration of the behavior of human beings under stress. It doesn't solve any great problems--unless you are willing, as I am, to consider the human being and his relationship to other human beings a great problem. What the play says, essentially, is that given a set of circumstances and conditions that he isn't used to, a man either rises or he falls. If he falls, it's too bad. But if he rises--well, that's a real triumph.
There is no doubt that it is possible for a man imbued with hope to fall. If he does, it's too bad. But a man without hope can hardly fail to fall. A man without hope can never triumph. If we, as a Civilization, are to rise above the circumstances and conditions which face us, if we are to move on to a real triumph, we must rid ourselves of our blanket of fear, we must have hope. And it is toward the creation of this hope that all creative people must willingly bend their efforts, or we shall surely fall.