MUNDEN’S SIR PETER TEAZLE
| The Times.] | [September 8, 1817. |
Drury-Lane Theatre.
This theatre opened on Saturday with The School for Scandal and Past Ten O’clock. The chief novelty in the former was Munden’s Sir Peter Teazle. We cannot speak very favourably of it. He did not feel at home in the part, which is indeed quite out of his way. His lengthened visage and abrupt tones did not suit the character or sentiments of Sir Peter. Sir Peter is a common every-day sort of character, a tetchy amorous old bachelor, who has married a young wife, with an uneasy consciousness of his own infirmities, and placed in situations to make those infirmities more ridiculous. But still he is a classical character, and not a grotesque; and, therefore, the actor’s peculiar talents were thrown away upon him, or rather were judiciously kept as much as possible in the back-ground, and hardly dared to show themselves once the whole evening. Mr. Munden went through the part with laudable gravity and decorum, without making any hole in his manners; nor did he purposely play the clown or pantomime in any of the scenes. Yet the negation of farce is not comedy. Sir Peter was a knight newly dubbed as well as married, a gentleman on his good behaviour both with his mistress and the public. We missed the irresistible expansion of his broad, shining face; and reckoned up a number of suppressed shrugs, and embryo grimaces, that shrunk from the glare of the new gas lights. His eyebrows were not lifted up with wonder; his lips were not moistened with jests as with marmalade; nor did his chin drop down once its whole length as with a total dislocation of his ideas. In the scene of the discovery in the fourth act, where his wife as ‘the little French Milliner’ is concealed behind the screen, he took a greater license, but from the mechanical restraint to which he had been subjected, there was something even here dolorous and petrified in his manner. If, however, Mr. Munden did penance in Sir Peter, it was a holyday-time with him, high carnival in Old Nosy in the farce, where he made himself and the audience amends for all the temptations he had resisted to indulge his natural genius, and let out his whole faculties of face, voice, and gesture. In his character, as an old steward, he is reeling-ripe from the beginning to the end of the piece; and he produces a dizziness in the heads of the audience as unavoidable, though more pleasant than that which overtakes the passengers in a Margate hoy. The School for Scandal was, in the other characters, cast much as usual, and as well as the strength of the company in genteel comedy would permit. Mrs. Davison’s Lady Teazle, though not without spirit, is too coarse and hoydening. Wallack’s Joseph Surface wanted dignity and plausibility. Not to compare him with old Jack Palmer, he does not hit off the officious condescending solemnity of the character so well as Young. He seems sulky and reserved, instead of being self-complacent and ostentatious; to shrink into a cautious contemplation of his own designs and villainy, instead of protecting others under the shadow of his assumed virtues, and covering their failings and defects with a veil of pompous sentiment. It was said of Garrick, that he played the footman too like the fine gentleman; Mr. Wallack, on the other hand, plays the fine gentleman too much like the footman. When dressed to most advantage, he puts us in mind of a valet out of livery. Mr. Rae’s Charles Surface was without any thing to recommend it, but the wit, gaiety, and magnanimity of the author. His mode of speaking is more harsh and untuneable in comedy than in regular declamation, which in some measure hides its habitual defects. It is a brogue in full gallop suddenly stopped short by the turnpike gate of criticism. Harley’s Sir Benjamin Backbite was inoffensive from its insipidity; and Knight as old Crabtree had painted his eyebrows very naturally. The house was not very crowded. The curtain drew up punctually at seven, without any previous expression of impatience; and the play was over before ten: but the rapidity with which the acts followed one another, and the almost immediate interruption of the music between the acts as soon as it had struck up, produced on us an unpleasant effect. It was like going a journey in the mail-coach, where they do not allow you time for your meals. A good play, like a hearty dinner, requires some time for digestion: the music in the orchestra acts upon the imagination, like wine upon the stomach; and habit makes it as ungrateful to us to be disappointed of the one as to be deprived of the other.