When the curtain is down, the action on the stage remains, as it were,
in suspense. The audience lets its attention revert to the affairs of
real life; and it is quite willing, when the mimic world is once more
revealed, to suppose that any reasonable space of time has elapsed while
its thoughts were occupied with other matters. It is much more difficult
for it to accept a wholly imaginary lapse of time while its attention is
centred on the mimic world. Some playwrights have of late years adopted
the device of dropping their curtain once, or even twice, in the middle
of an act, to indicate an interval of a few minutes, or even of an
hour--for instance, of the time between "going in to dinner" and the
return of the ladies to the drawing-room. Sir Arthur Pinero employs this
device with good effect in _Iris_; so does Mr. Granville Barker in
_Waste_, and Mr. Galsworthy in _The Silver Box_. It is certainly far
preferable to that "ideal" treatment of time which was common in the
French drama of the nineteenth century, and survives to this day in
plays adapted or imitated from the French.
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