From The Times: March 25, 1922
All intelligent playgoers will agree with Lady Bell and our other correspondents in lamenting the excess of curtain-calls which in the modern theatre destroys the illusion of the play.
The fault lies not mainly with the players. Though they are, perhaps, a little too sensitive to the old rule that they who live to please must please to live, they cannot decline a favour that is demanded of them; and it is natural that they should sometimes grant the favour when it is not demanded. Part of the showman’s lure is to create an impression of success, to which a saltatory curtain may contribute much. The fault lies mainly with the public, which persists in holding the player more interesting than the play.
This craze is not all idle curiosity. Ever since the player-caste became distinguished from common humanity, actors and actresses have been vested in glamour. It may well be that they are, indeed, different in nature from other people; but the mystery that glorifies them is a mystery which only grows in charm as each player grows in eminence. The desire to admire actors and actresses rather than plays is no new thing. People went to the theatre to see Garrick as Benedick rather than Much Ado about Nothing; Barry as Romeo, rather than Romeo and Juliet; Mrs Siddons as Isabella, rather than The Fatal Marriage; and Kean as Gloucester, rather than King Richard III. But since then photography and other methods of publicity have greatly increased the public’s familiarity with the players, and with it the mystery and the appetite grows with what it feeds on, until the capital moment of the performance has come to be that in which the players may be seen, lightly disguised indeed as other persons than themselves, but looking exactly like their photographs and not pretending to be other than known players exhibiting themselves before their adoring public.
Abstention from applause would not meet the case. But “producers” with any pretension to theatrical art and propriety might arrange that, except in cases of general and dominating demand for particular players, each “curtain call” should present a tableau of the players still in character and maintaining or forwarding the action of the play.