Dramatic Opinions and Essays, Vol. 2

DRAMATIC OPINIONS AND ESSAYS WITH AN APOLOGY BY BERNARD SHAW CONTAINING AS WELL A WORD ON THE DRAMATIC OPINIONS AND ESSAYS OF BERNARD SHAW BY JAMES HUNEKER VOLUME TWO NEW YORK: BRENTANO’S, MCMXXII CONTENTS The New Magda and The New Cyprienne Miss Nethersole and Mrs. Kendal Some Other Critics The Second Dating of Sheridan “The Spacious Times” Daly Undaunted Blaming the Bard Morris as Actor and Dramatist The Red Robe On Deadheads and Other Matters Ibsen Ahead! Peer Gynt in Paris Little Eyolf Toujours Shakespeare Ibsen Without Tears Richard Himself Again Better than Shakespeare Satan Saved at Last The New Ibsen Play Olivia Mr. Wilson Babbett as the Messiah For England, Home, and Beauty ii The Echegaray Matinees Gallery Rowdyism Madox Brown, Watts, and Ibsen Shakespeare in Manchester Meredith on Comedy Mr. Pinero on Turning Forty Madame Sans-Gêne John Gabriel Borkman A Doll’s House Again Ibsen Triumphant Mainly About Shakespeare Robertson Redivivus Lorenzaccio Ghosts at the Jubilee Mr. Grundy’s Improvements on Dumas “Hamlet” At Several Theatres The Theatres Romance in its Last Ditch Vegetarian and Arboreal Chin Chon Chino Shakespkare and Mr. Barrie On Pleasure Bent iii A Breath from the Spanish Main Hamlet Revisted Peace and Good Will to Managers Tappertit on Caesar Mr. Pinero’s Past Beaumont and Fletcher Shakespeare’s Merry Gentlemen The Drama in Hoxton Mr. Charles Frohman’s Mission The Drama Purified Kate Terry Van Amburgh Revived G.B.S. Vivisected Valedictory iv THE NEW MAGDA AND THE NEW CYPRIENNE Magda: a play in four acts. Translated by Louis N. Parker from Hermann Sudermann‟s “Home.” Ly- ceum Theatre, 3 June, 1896. The Queen‟s Proctor: a comedy in three acts. Adapted by Herman Merivale from “Divorçons,” by Victorien Sardou and E. de Najac. Royalty Theatre, 2 June, 1896. IN all the arts there is a distinction between the mere physical artistic faculty, consisting of a very fine sense of color, form, tone, rhythmic movement, and so on, and that supreme sense of humanity which alone can raise the art work created by the physical artistic faculties into a convincing presentment of life. Take the art of acting, for instance. The physically gifted actor can fill in a conventional artistic outline with great charm. He—or she (I really mean she, as will appear presently)—can move exquisitely within the prescribed orbit of a dance, can ring out the measure of a line of blank verse to a hair‟s-breadth, can devise a dress well and wear it beautifully, can, in short, carry out with infinite fascination the design of any dramatic work that aims at sensuous and romantic beauty alone. But present this same fascinating actress with a work to the execution of which the sense of humanity is the only clue, in which there is no verse to guide the voice and no dance to guide the body, in which every line must appear ponderously dull and insignifi- cant unless its truth as the utterance of a deeply moved human soul can be made apparent, in which the epi- curean admiration of her as an exquisite apparition, heightened, of course, by sex attraction, can be but a trifling element in the deep sympathy with her as a fellow-creature which is produced by a great dramatist‟s revelation of ourselves to our own consciousness through her part, and then you may very possibly see your bewitching artist making a quite childish failure on the very boards where a little while before she was disputing the crown of her profession with the greatest actresses in the world. If you doubt me, then do you, if you have had the good fortune to see Mrs. Patrick Campbell play Mi- litza in “For the Crown” like an embodied picture or poem of the decorative romantic type, now go and see her play Magda. And go soon; for the play will not run long: human nature will not endure such a spec- tacle for many weeks. That is not the fault of the play, which does not fail until she kills it. At the end of the first act, before Magda appears, the applause has a rising flood in it which shows that the house is caught by the promise of the drama. Ten minutes after Mrs. Campbell‟s entry it is all over: thencefor- ward the applause, though complimentary and copious, is from the lips outward. The first-night audience had for the most part seen Bernhardt and Duse in the part, and knew what could be done with it. Nobody, I presume, was so foolishly unreasonable as to expect anything approaching the wonderful impersonation by Duse at Drury Lane, when she first played the part here last year. Mrs. Campbell has not lived long enough to get as much work crammed into her entire repertory as Duse gets into every ten minutes of her Magda. Nor has she had sufficient stage experience to polish off the part with the businesslike competence of the golden Sarah, coming down with her infallible stroke on every good stage point in the dialogue, and never letting the play drag for an instant. But even if the audience had never seen either Bernhardt or Duse, it could not have mistaken Mrs. Campbell for a competent Magda, although it might very possibly have mistaken the play for a dull and prosy one. The fact is, if Mrs. Campbell‟s irresistible physical gifts and her cunning eye for surface effects had only al- lowed her to look as silly as she really was in the part (and in one or two passages she very nearly achieved this), her failure would have been as obvious to the greenest novice in the house as it was to me. Take such a dramatic moment, for instance, as that in which Magda receives, first the card, and then the visit of Von Keller, the runaway father of her child. Let us leave Duse‟s incomparable acting of that scene out of the question, even if it is impossible to forget it. But with Mrs. Campbell it was not merely a falling short of Duse that one had to complain of. She literally did nothing. From the point at which Miss Caldwell, as the servant, brought in the card, to the point at which Magda, her emotion mastered, good-humoredly shakes hands with the fellow (how capitally vulgarly 2 Sarah did that!), Mrs. Campbell did not display as much feeling as an ordinary woman of fifty does at the arrival of the postman. Whether her nonentity at this point was the paralysis of a novice who does not know how to express what she feels, or whether it was the vacuity of a woman who does not feel at all, I cannot determine. The result was that the audience did not realize that anything particular was supposed to be happening; and those who had seen the play before wondered why it should be so much less intelligible in English than in a foreign language. Let me give one other instance. Quite the easiest line in the piece is the prima donna‟s remark, when she hears about Marie‟s lieutenant lover, “A lieutenant! with us it‟s always a tenor.” Mrs. Campbell actually succeeded in delivering that speech without making any one smile. At the other end of the compass of the piece we have the terrible line which strikes the Colo- nel dead at the end—“How do you know that he was the only one?” (meaning “How do you know that this man Von Keller, whom you want me to marry to make an honest woman of me, is the only man who has been my lover?”). Mrs. Campbell made an obvious attempt to do something with this line at the last moment. But there is nothing to be done with it except prepare its effect by acting beforehand so as to make the situation live, and then let it do its own work. Between these two failures I can recall no suc- cess; indeed, I can hardly recall any effort that went far enough to expose Mrs. Campbell to the risk of active failure. Although she was apparently doing her best with the part, her best let its best slip by her, and only retained its commonplaces. The part of Magda is no doubt one in which a young actress may very well be excused for failing. But from the broad point of view of our national in- terest in art, it is necessary, when work of the class of Sudermann‟s is in question, to insist on the claim of the public to have the best dramas of the day presented in English by the fittest talent. Mrs. Campbell was entitled to her turn; but now that it is clear that the part does not suit her, are we to have it locked up lest any other actress should demonstrate that it can be done better? Are we to have no chance of seeing how 3 it would come out in the hands of the actresses who have shown a special aptitude for this class of work? Miss Elizabeth Robins would certainly not play Militza half as effectively as Mrs. Campbell; but can it be doubted by any one who has seen her play Hilda Wangel that she would play Magda, especially in the self-assertive scenes, twenty times better than Mrs. Campbell? Miss Robins can assert herself more youth- fully, and pity herself more pathetically, than any actress on our stage. Doubtless she might fail to con- vince us in the sympathetic, grandly maternal phases of the character, but what about Miss Janet Achurch for that side of it? Miss Achurch, with no copyright monopoly of “A Doll‟s House,” has never been ap- proached as Nora Helmer: Mrs.

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