Abstract
Best known as a critic and poet, Lascelles Abercrombie (1881-1938) was also a playwright deeply concemed with the state of the English theatre in the first three decades of this century. For the most part, he was adversely critical of the commercial theatre of his day, opposed to the twin evils of sentimentality and the factual treatment of contemporary social issues, what he termed "naturalism." He wanted to create and promote plays which conveyed the type of "symbolic realism" he found in the work of two feIlow Georgians, John Drinkwater and Gordon Bottomley. In Drinkwater's Cophetua, he saw "a bold attempt to break through the accretions of dramatic convention ... and to achieve a broader, simpler, more frankly symbolic method of drama"; and in Bottomley's The Riding 10 Lithend, he appreciated a play shaped not "according to nature, but according to the curves of beauty, into a symbol of life infinitely more powerful than any actuality could do."
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