Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction; but though my father was an avid reader he knew that writing requires those tedious virtues, patience and application, that it is a solitary occupation with a public that exists only in the writer’s imagination. On the other hand the theatre brought a ready-made solution to his problems. The actor is spared the horrors of creation: he is offered on a plate an imaginary universe in which a special place has been created for him; he occupies that place in the flesh, before an audience of flesh and blood.
