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The Kensington  Volume 1   Issue: 5  July 1901  Page: 170
 
 The Drama By Christopher St. John
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bacon ”with love and good leave” since they had sworn to “these conditions without any fear” Before the recipients of the bounty might depart they were seated together in a huge chair and borne on men’s shoulders round the town, their well-deserved prize being carried in front of them.

Wives dared not be too free with their tongues in those good old days, lest they should be subjected to a very unpleasant form of punishment specially reserved for shrewish dames, the chief instrument in which was a strong wooden armchair, attached to one end of a see-saw, and suspended over a dam, river, or well. Into this the offender was securely tied, and the other end of the beam, which worked on a pivot, was raised until she was ducked in the water, the number of dips varying with the length and strength of her unruly member.

(To be continued)


The Drama

BY CHRISTOPHER ST. JOHN

L'Aiglon, which, happily for us, Madame Sarah Bernhardt has been the first to bring on to a London stage, is a finer play than Cyrano de Bergerac; it is also a less accomplished and a less fascinating poem. There are many rough lines in L'Aiglon, and you may seek in vain for those fanciful touches which were spangled all over Cyrano, and caught the light so dexterously that the dullest eye could not ignore their brightness. In the later work, Rostand the dramatist and stage-player — by that name I want to indicate the theatrical virtuosity which is one of Rostand’s most striking possessions — has swallowed up Rostand the writer of exquisitely polished verse. The result is a strong and sincere play, the chief fault of which is that it is conceived on too grandiose lines. Even with cuts which injure its development, and reduce the fourth act almost to a scenario, L'Aiglon takes four hours to play, a fact which has led to the unfounded accusation of lengthiness and verbosity. The design of the play is well proportioned, and no single scene is too long, but the magnitude of Rostand’s scale is Elizabethan, and he has not cared to remember that, except in China, theatres must open and close at a certain hour.

So far as I can judge, Rostand’s heroic and sublime drama has been but imperfectly appreciated and perfunctorily praised in England. And I can well understand those six acts chilling and boring anyone who has not taken the trouble to put aside English prejudices and English habits of feeling while the play is in progress. It is absolutely necessary to judge it by French standards, to absorb the exaltation with which the Frenchman thinks of his country and its glory, to regard Napoleon not as a curious theme, but as a fire at the very memory of which men’s hearts can still burst into flame. Every other line of L'Aiglon has an allusion to that stupendous force, and most of these allusions are lost on an English audience. Shall English people be allowed to call Rostand’s drama dull, gloomy, and monotonous because of that? Not without a protest from me! You
The Kensington  Volume 1   Issue: 5  July 1901  Page: -
 
 The Drama By Christopher St. John
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SARAH BERNHARDT

Drawn specially for The Kensington”

by PAMELA COLMAN SMITH
The Kensington  Volume 1   Issue: 5  July 1901  Page: 171
 
 The Drama By Christopher St. John
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must go and see L’Aiglon with your mind in sympathy with ideals which your English temperament has taught you to consider false and showy — then you will begin to understand its significance. The white uniform worn by Napoleon’s son will then be more to you than a pretty dress in which Madame Bernhardt contrives to look extraordinarily youthful. Napoleon’s cocked hat lying on the table in the moonlight at Schonbrunn will remind you of a thousand deeds which fermented in the head of the conqueror, whose subjugation to mortality is as pathetically proved by the life of his hat after him as by his powerlessness to live again in his son. On the bare and paltry history of that son, the fragile bearer of the lofty titles of King of Rome, Duke of Reichstadt, and Napoleon the Second, Rostand has founded a play full of striking incident and brilliant studies of character. The plot is concerned with the attempt of the Duke, in whom the blood of the worn-out Hapsburgs and the blood of the swiftly - risen Bonapartes clash strangely, to triumph over the moral servitude in which he languishes at Schonbrunn. The unhealthy, nervous boy does get as far in his rebellion as an abortive escape from his Austrian prison (where Metternich has appointed himself chief jailer) to France, where, he is assured, he has only to appear and the Imperial throne will be ready to embrace him. But all the time the dramatist makes clear that the Eaglet does not believe in his destiny. On his brow — the fair brow of Marie Louise — is lashed the symbol of the victim, and though for a minute he may be 'superbe', as in the scene with the treacherous Marmont, he is the son of Napoleon only in sentiment, and of that sentiment he dies. I excuse myself from analysing the play. Its masterly stagecraft could not be even hinted at by such an analysis. But I should feel ashamed not to say generally that, while severely simple in its main theme, it contains nearly every element of interest which can be made effective on the stage. The width of Rostand’s range is surprising. In the homely scene between the Duke and his grandfather, in the weird and imaginative monologue on the plains of Wagram, his hand is equally sure and skilful. Far from being exhausted by the psychological tour de force involved in creating such a character as that of the roguish, melancholy, despairing, aspiring, heroic yet feeble Duke of Reichstadt, Rostand has given also wonderful studies of that middling great man, Metternich, of the silly pigeon-brained Marie Louise, of the good-natured, lazy-minded Emperor of Austria, of Marmont, of the romantic child Thérèse, of the brave, coarse-grained Countess of Camerata, and above all of Flambeau, a fine type of the jovial hero so dear to the heart of the nation which produced Dumas.

The enormous part of l’Aiglon is played by Madame Sarah Bernhardt as well as it could be played by any living actor or actress. I know that there are some people who cannot take a woman in a masculine role seriously. I am glad that I have not that particular limitation. Madame Bernhardt gets her effects and achieves her triumph through pure acting, not through the creation of an illusion. I can imagine that both Mr. Martin Harvey and Mr. Seymour Hicks, to mention two names which have been suggested in connection with the production of L'Aiglon in English, might make a more realistic and consequently a more painful Duke of Reichstadt, but neither they, nor any actor young enough to establish an illusion through personality, would have the skill to bring out the
The Kensington  Volume 1   Issue: 5  July 1901  Page: 172
 
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inconceivable variety of the part. To those who measure the art of acting entirely by the impression of reality produced, Madame Bernhardt’s l’Aiglon will not appeal. They will hardly he able to say of it, as they do of the tablecloth in an Academy picture: — “Isn’t it just like the real thing?” But to others who are thrilled by an interpretation, because it shows mastery of everything in acting which is difficult, because it is beautiful, resourceful and charming, Madame Bernhardt’s performance will take its place among their greatest stage memories. If the great actress owed a debt of gratitude to Rostand for having created a part which gives scope for her finest gifts, she has paid the debt in full. Monsieur Coquelin, as Flambeau, has a part which might be played sentimentally. He prefers to treat it in the spirit of comedy, and to my mind the underlying pathos in the part is more fully revealed by the genius in Coquelin’s light and droll touch. M. Desjardins hardly realises the dramatist’s study of Metternich. He treats the scene where the sight of Napoleon’s hat on the table calls up the memory of the day when the Corsican dictated terms to Metternich and his Hapsburgs with much skill, but it is his fault that the scene with the Duke before the glass entirely fails to produce the terrible effect intended. Madame Mea’s comedy is not equal to Marie Louise, and Madame Damiroff fails to indicate the beautiful romance of La Petite Source. The rest of the cast are quite efficient, and the mounting of the play is very fine on the whole. Far more could have been made of the masked ball, and I regret the meretricious yellow light which is turned on the Duke at dawn in the Wagram act. Otherwise this difficult scene is poetically staged.

So brief are the lives of plays just now, that I who write for a monthly journal find constantly that I am writing of the dead. Mr. Forbes Robertson’s expansion of Tiercelin’s one-act play The Sacrament of Judas proved a failure at the Comedy. If it had been originally written in three acts, its fate would have been happier, but, as everyone knew, from having seen the climax as a one-act play, what was coming, and as the first two acts did nothing but lead up to the climax, and were not interesting in themselves, there was no chance of success. This sounds confusing, but represents accurately what was wrong with the experiment. The beautiful Breton dresses, exhibiting that skill in the treatment of colour and that exquisitely good taste in detail which always distinguish the work of Miss Edith Craig, alone made me sorry that The Sacrament of Judas, in its longer form, failed to please the public. Mr. Forbes Robertson again gave a masterly performance of Jacques Bernez, the apostate-priest. For days I could not forget his intonation of the powerful line: “I am not a priest in my soul”. Mr. Frank Mills was by no means at his best as the nobleman of loose life and scrupulously religious beliefs, and there was a want of energy in the presentation of the piece which made one feel as if all concerned in it knew that it was doomed. I could not sympathise with Mr. Forbes Robertson over the failure of his last production, which he ought never to have touched with the end of a pair of tongs. But I am sincerely sorry that an artistic venture like The Sacrament of Judas, in every way worthy of him, should have brought him no luck.

Where is luck to be found? It is certainly keeping out of the way of most theatrical
The Kensington  Volume 1   Issue: 5  July 1901  Page: 173
 
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managers. Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s revival of Echegeray’s Mariana was withdrawn after a fortnight’s run. I believed in Mariana when it was first put on for a series of matinees at the Court Theatre by Miss Elizabeth Robins. Mrs. Campbell’s revival has shaken my faith. The new translation of the play is not an improvement on the old. Apparently an attempt was made to prune Echegeray’s exuberant adjectives, to tone down his Southern extravagance. Echegeray having no subtlety to speak of, the result was colourless, dull, and bald. To make the Anglicising process complete, Mrs. Campbell engaged Mr. Titheradge, a sound actor of the old school with a sane and elderly personality, to play the part of Mariana’s rash, mad, wild-word lover, whose age is indicated by Echegeray to be twenty-two at the outside. When I saw Danicle Montoya represented in the Royalty production of Mariana as forty and sensible, I knew that there was no hope for it. But further mistakes were made. The part of Mariana’s good old friend and counsellor, which Mr. Hermann Vezin played beautifully at the Court, was entrusted to Mr. Berte Thomas, who had no notion what to do with it. Mr. Arliss made the antiquary tedious to the audience in front as well as to the audience on the stage. In the original production, Mr. Welch in the same part was mirth-moving; it was difficult to believe it when one saw Mr. Arliss. Mr. Du Maurier made a dull and odious person of the young society sprig whom Mr. Harvey first played with dainty grace. As to Mrs. Campbell’s Mariana, I need hardly say that she played the part more brilliantly and more forcibly than Miss Robins. But was her idea of Mariana so good? I cannot think so. Mrs. Campbell did not suggest a high-spirited, loveable, and witty woman with one plague-spot in her heart, but an habitually gloomy and sorrow-laden soul. Her last act was powerful, and, if I may say so, not at all intelligent. In fact, Mrs. Campbell and her company only caught hold of the obvious side of Mariana; there is more in the play than anyone dreams who saw it at the Royalty alone. The stage-manager’s ideas of Spanish “atmosphere” were a little crude. Spanish ladies of Echegeray’s class do not dress like gitanas, and they would consider that they were writing themselves down as disreputables if they smoked a cigarette.

I had an impression that the Stage Society was a body with an ideal. Their last production has done much to destroy the impression. Mr. Kingsley Tarpey’s farce, Windmills, performed at the Comedy Theatre on June 16th, is excellent fooling, 'mais que diable allait-il-faire dans cette galère', as Molière said, quoting Cyrano de Bergerac without acknowledgement? The performances organised by the Society are private, and they are privileged to give plays which the Censor will not license, plays which are not likely to appeal to a typical playgoing public, plays which for some reason or another a management fears to run the risk of producing in the usual way. Yet the Society, ignoring its privilege, puts before its members a clever and ingenious but quite unremarkable farce, which requires far more rehearsal than the players engaged by the Society are able to give to make it go with the necessary swiftness and briskness. The Independent Theatre and the New Century Theatre made mistakes, but at least they never made themselves ridiculous by gravely producing a version of In the Soup. Fortunately for the reputation of the Stage Society, Windmills was preceded by a very thoughtful one-act play by Miss Laurence Alma-Tadema. The Unseen Helmsman, though stupidly stage-managed and
The Kensington  Volume 1   Issue: 5  July 1901  Page: 174
 
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played with an uncertain and apologetic touch by Miss Joan Barnett and Miss Edyth Olive, revealed itself as the work of one who has in no small degree a talent for writing simple and poetical dialogue, and a sincere dramatic sense. Miss Tadema’s characters struck me as obscure in their outlines, and very difficult to act. She does not value space enough, words being constantly spoken where an empty field should have been left for the actress’s suggestion. But her play has the rare quality of provoking thought, and makes one want to see more work from the same delicate and original hand.