Excerpt from Second Nights: People and Ideas of the Theatre to-Day The second-nighter breathes a duller ether. Gone is the mystery and contagious warmth, the first night's febrile unrest. The show man has opened his bag of tricks; the pack are off, baying after new game. There is no one in the audience. The man in front does not turn round to tell you how the author sat up all the night before rewriting his third act - he is mere paper, or the brother of the property man's wife, or the sad-eyed sub editor of a technical magazine, or an out-of town buyer drifted in to The Lady from the Sea, thinking it a musical comedy. The play is better given than on the first night, but it stands on its own feet, is shorn of extraneous glamour. And the second-nighter himself, though he turn up as regular as the clock - and magazine critics are likely to receive tickets for second nights - is scarcely detached from the common herd. He is part of the public. The news and the spot light have swung on ere he arrives. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.