THE DUCHESS OF MALFI

THE production by the Phœnix Society of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, gave many people an opportunity to make an exhibition of themselves. In the first place, it was somewhat astonishing to find that on the Sunday night the audience, which one might have supposed to have been made up of people of some education, contained many persons who were evidently unaware that Webster wrote at the very beginning of the seventeenth century, and who had gone to the Lyric Theatre expecting to find a classical and not a renaissance tragedy. Perhaps this is being too kind to them; perhaps they thought The Duchess of Malfi was a Revue, or a Viennese Musical Comedy by Leo Fall or Franz Lehar, which, owing to D.O.R.A., could not yet be produced on the ordinary stage. But perhaps they did not even think at all, and their tittering and nudging was merely the manifestation of the vacancy of their minds. Whatever the explanation, it is certainly odd that such people should be—as they presumably were—members of the Phœnix Society. It has been said to me that this section of the audience was composed largely of the profession, to whom Sunday night is their one opportunity of the week to enjoy the role of spectator. I hesitate to believe it. I refuse to believe it, although the notorious and shameful ignorance of many actors and actresses of the dramatic literature of their own country is difficult to forget. But if this is the explanation—and it is an unpalatable one—it also accounts for the reception given—again by a section only of the audience—to Mr. Farquharson's extraordinarily fine effort to grapple with the part of Ferdinand. The rank and file of actors, like the rank and file of musicians, are notoriously poor judges of their own art. They are sound enough when it is a question of merely conventional skill. They know in an ordinary way the difference between the professional and the amateur. Mere clumsiness, roughness, or smoothness of technique they can discern and, to some extent, understand; but even in these matters it is the conventional, the accustomed way of doing a thing rather than the essentially good way of doing it that they judge by. The moment an actor goes outside routine methods he runs the risk of being ridiculed; his slightest faults and exaggerations and mistakes are fastened upon, while what there may be of insight, imagination, and power in his characterisation is completely passed over.

This is what happened to Mr. Robert Farquharson at The Duchess of Malfi. He gave an interpretation of the character of Ferdinand which was a real creative effort of the actor's imagination. Even if he had been less successful than he was in producing the effect he aimed at, he should have met with a respectful attention from his fellow-artists in the audience. But such an attention would have proceeded from an interest in and some glimmer of an understanding of the serious efforts of an artist; whereas these people who disgraced themselves by loudly giggling at Mr. Farquharson were not obviously blind to serious art.

Of Mr. Farquharson's interpretation I will say this. It was essentially sound and convincing. In portraying Ferdinand as a man abnormal, fanatical, and almost insane on the subject of sex, we are made to understand all his subsequent conduct. Ferdinand, as drawn by Webster, is a man of diseased imagination; he is described in the very first scene by Antonio as "a most perverse and turbulent nature"; his very language right from the start is more violent, more imaginative than that of any other character in the play. Sex is an obsession with him; his first words to his sister are:

You are a widow:
You know already what man is;

And his second:

Marry! they are most luxurious
Will wed twice. Their lovers are more spotted
Than Laban's sheep.

He cannot let the subject alone, he is always returning to it. Earlier in the scene, when he tells Bosola that he does not wish his sister to marry again, he says:

Do not you ask the reason, but be satisfied
I say I would not.

Mr. Farquharson said these words with just the right emphasis, an emphasis that sent a shudder through one's flesh, it was so simple, so vague, and yet so peculiar.

Now, for this Mr. Farquharson ought to have been highly praised. It meant, first of all, that Mr. Farquharson had an original conception of his part; and, secondly, that he had the technique to carry his conception across the footlights. But imagination must meet imagination; if it meets nothing but dullness it might just as well be dull itself, its effect is necessarily nil; and, apparently, that is what Mr. Farquharson's noble effort did meet. It was really astonishing to find written in the daily Press the pained little grumblings of men who had been unable to discover an adequate motive for Ferdinand's conduct, and who expressed their dissatisfaction with Webster's capacity as a dramatist, after having been accustomed for many years to the dramatic genius of Mr. Walter Ellis (the author of A Little Bit of Fluff), Mr. George R. Sims (the author of The Great Day), Mr. Oscar Asche (author of Chu Chin Chow), Mr. Robert Hichens (author of The Voice from the Minaret), and many others of equal greatness but too numerous to mention. It was perhaps an over-familiarity with the works of this galaxy of genius that led one London newspaper to describe The Duchess of Malfi in headlines as "Funnier than Farce." The atmosphere of a genuine tragedy might easily appear "funny" to anyone accustomed to that of the average London play. One great difficulty that confronted some critics was the impossibility—after a war in which millions were slaughtered—of imagining the murder of four men. Because Webster's tragedy ends in the death of four of the principal characters, it is, apparently, farcical or funny. It never even seems to have occurred to these detractors of a great work that in Italy of the Renaissance—the place and period with which Webster is dealing—such incidents were as common as divorce suits nowadays; but it would, assuredly, be asking too much to expect people to exercise a little historical imagination who have no imagination of any sort, and who are, therefore, to be pitied for their inability to understand any play that does not contain a telephone.

On the bulk of the audience, however, Mr. Farquharson's Ferdinand made a deep impression, and the wonderful fifth scene in the second act, where Ferdinand enters with the words: "I have this night digged up a mandrake," was very nearly one of the finest and most blood-curdling things I have ever witnessed. It was just marred by a few exaggerations of gesture and crudities which could have easily been put right, but in conception and power it was magnificent. I have used the word "blood-curdling," although I know that nobody's blood curdles nowadays, least of all the blood of dramatic critics. But that is just what is wrong with them. It is no distinction to have blood that does not "curdle." The blood of an ox does not curdle—not at the tragedy of King Lear, nor Macbeth, nor the third act of Die Walküre, nor the Prometheus of Scriabin. There must be an imagination in the spectator to take fire, and without imagination the work of a poet like Webster must of necessity appear incomprehensible:

Methinks I see her laughing—
Excellent hyena! Talk to me somewhat quickly,
Or my imagination will carry me
To see her in the shameful act of sin.

To the unimaginative these lines of Ferdinand's will seem nothing, but they are wonderful in their dramatic vividness and appropriateness. I have quoted them because it is the sort of writing Webster gives us on every page; it is not one of his purple patches. Webster's command of language is little short of marvellous. To anyone with a sense of words it is a wonderful experience to read The Duchess of Malfi for the first time; and after seeing it played one returns to the book and finds it all ten times more wonderful still. Could anything be more utter cant than the suggestion that the plays of many modern dramatists are superior to Webster's even as literature? How many of them can be read at all, even once? It is so nearly impossible that more than half of them cannot be published, and of those that are published the perusal of a few pages leads to their prompt consignment to the dustbin. As for ever attaining that combination of great poetry with perfect dramatic appropriateness culminating in moments when vox in faucibus hæsit, it is utterly beyond them. Such passages as:

Bosola. Strangling; here are your executioners.
Duch. I forgive them:
The apoplexy, catarrh, or cough o' the lungs
Would do as much as they do.
Bos. Doth not death fright you?
Duch. Who would be afraid on't
Knowing to meet such excellent company
In the other world?
Bos. Yet, methinks
The manner of your death should much afflict you:
This cord should terrify you.
Duch. Not a whit:
What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut
With diamonds? or to be smotherèd
With cassia? or to be shot to death with pearls?
I know death hath ten thousand several doors
For men to take their exits; and 'tis found
They go on such strange geometrical hinges
You may open them both ways.

Such passages are as abundant in Webster as dots in the novels of Mr. H. G. Wells. The only readable modern English dramatist—with the exception of Mr. Granville Barker, and possibly of Sir James Barrie—is Mr. Shaw; but one reads Mr. Shaw for his wit, and his wit, like water-ices, is, though tasty, very poor sustenance. Yet the same people who treat The Duchess of Malfi as "Farce" take Mr. Shaw's amusing buffoonery quite seriously; and there is one explanation for both phenomena, and it is the one with which I began—lack of imagination. An imaginative man does not need Mr. Shaw to show him in a play that soldiers value their lives, and there being nothing astoundingly novel in the idea, he is free to appreciate Mr. Shaw's extravagant humour; but the unimaginative man thinks, firstly, that it is some perilous and subversive doctrine, or some new and wonderful truth—according to his political prejudice—and then, secondly, when some personal experience fits Mr. Shaw's formula, looks upon Mr. Shaw as a dealer in real property, and has for him that serious consideration he has for his landlord. This explains the fate of such a brilliant piece of extravaganza as Arms and the Man, which Mr. Loraine has produced at the Duke of York's Theatre. Originally the darling of unimaginative intellectuals—to whom it had brought light—and the bugbear of equally unimaginative Philistines—to whom its "light" was the flame of revolution—it is now accepted by the ordinary man in the pit as an ordinary, matter-of-fact account of what war is, because the man in the pit is just back from one and recognises the likeness. The deafening applause from ex-soldiers at the Duke of York's Theatre is something to go and hear. To them Mr. Shaw is no intellectual forerunner opening up obscure paths of thought, but a man who has described exactly what used to go on in the only army they have ever known, and they have for him the serious respect they have for all retailers of materials. He is a dealer not in "fancies," but in real goods. But this "reality" is just as imaginary as the former "light." Neither Bluntschli nor Cyrano de Bergerac represents the soldier. There is, in fact, no such thing as a soldier, there are only soldiers. The intellectual has never had his "light" nor the plain man his "reality"; for, being without imagination, they cannot have these things. There is no way of truth reaching an unimaginative man; he is doomed to live under a series of illusions, only shedding one to receive another, but, by a sublime paradox, the only illusion he can never shed is the illusion that poetry is an illusion, an illusion of the senses. It is the fate of poetry, of such magnificent poetic drama as Webster's, to remain always undraped in the world of imagination and never by any protective mimicry to take the colour of its surroundings and put on a fashionable dress. This, its unique greatness, is in the eyes of the unimaginative man its weakness, because he fails to recognise in it any of the outward appearances of his daily life—in short, he fails to see his washerwoman because to him she is a washerwoman and not a woman.

It is pleasant to think that there are actors and actresses who practically, for sheer love of their art, will give their time and ability for two isolated performances of a long and difficult work like The Duchess of Malfi. The performance, as a whole, was remarkably good, and it seems to me worth while recording the cast here:

FERDINAND, Duke of CalabriaROBERT FARQUHARSON
CARDINAL, his BrotherION SWINLEY
ANTONIO BOLOGNA, Steward of the Household to the DuchessNICHOLAS HANNEN
DELIO, his friendMURRAY KINNELL
DANIEL DE BOSOLA, Gentleman of the Horse to the DuchessWILLIAM J. REA
CASTRUCCIOFREDERICK HARKER
MARQUIS OF PESCARAROBERT ATKINS
COUNT MALATESTEBASIL GORDON
RODERIGOIVAN SAMSON
SILVIOCLAUDE ALLISTER
GRISOLANJ. ADRIAN BYRNE
DOCTORJOSEPH A. DODD
THE DUCHESS OF MALFICATHLEEN NESBITT
CARIOLA, her WomanFLORENCE BUCKTON
JULIA, Castruccio's wife and the Cardinal's mistressEDITH EVANS
OLD LADYBLANCHE STANLEY

The Play produced by Allan Wade, in a setting designed by Norman Wilkinson of Four Oaks.

Of Mr. Farquharson I have already spoken. Equally fine but smoother and more accomplished was the work of Miss Cathleen Nesbitt as the Duchess. Mr. William J. Rea gave a fine and convincing study of Bosola, whose "garb of melancholy" he wore with an exquisite naturalness. Mr. Rea has a beautiful voice, and I hope it gave him as much pleasure to speak Webster's wonderful verse as it gave me to hear it so beautifully spoken. Antonio is difficult to make attractive, but Mr. Nicholas Hannen might have been more successful. I thought Miss Edith Evans's Julia excellent, but the Cardinal might well have been more sinister; he has some splendid lines to speak, including the famous:

When I look into the fish-ponds in my garden,
Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake,
That seems to strike at me,

and they were not always as effective as they might have been. It is to be hoped that the Phœnix Society will get a large number of new members through this fine production.

*****

The French Classical Matinées at 2.30 every Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon at the Duke of York's Theatre will be as follows: Les Plaideurs, January 6th, 7th, 13th, 14th, 20th, and 21st.

W. J. TURNER