I attended the new sort of playhouse on Tuesday and I confess I have thought of little else since, principally as a business matter.

The novelty is this: there is no play. There are no players, in the old sense of persons who have learnt lines. There are simply eleven ordinary people, put into a furnished house together, none of them acquainted, and the public is admitted to watch them through a wall arranged for the purpose. That is the whole of the entertainment. They quarrel about the washing-up. On Tuesday two of them did not speak for the better part of an hour and the house was rapt.

The economy of it is magnificent and I want to set it down plainly, because I do not think the proprietors themselves have grasped what they have.

A playhouse of the ordinary kind must pay a writer, and a company of trained players, and a man to paint the scenery. This one pays none of them. The performers supply their own dialogue, at no charge, having been given nothing to do and a great deal of time in which to not do it. They also supply the plot, by disliking one another, which they can be relied upon to arrange within about two days of being shut in together. I have rarely seen a manufactory in which the raw material walks in of its own accord and asks to be used.

I have three suggestions for the proprietors, which I offer freely, and which I shall be very cross to see adopted without acknowledgement.

First, put fewer chairs in the room than there are persons. I observed that the entire disturbance of Tuesday evening proceeded from a shortage of somewhere to sit, and a shortage is cheaper to install than a quarrel is to hire.

Second, let the audience expel one of them each week by vote. The public will pay to watch. The public will pay considerably more to decide, and will then attend faithfully to see whether it decided rightly.

Third, a contest of cookery. I have given this a good deal of thought. Set them to bake, appoint two gentlemen of severe expression to taste the results and pronounce upon them, and you will have a spectacle in which nothing whatever is at stake and every person in the house is nonetheless unable to look away. I would attend it myself. I would attend it weekly. I am aware of what that admission does to my argument and I make it anyway.

I am told by graver men than myself that all this is a symptom of something and that the something is bad. Very likely. Most profitable things are a symptom of something. But I would observe that people have always paid to watch other people fall out; the innovation here is merely that we have stopped paying anyone to pretend, and passed the saving on.