SOME OF THE OLD ACTORS.
| The Examiner.] | [April 27, 1828. |
The last week or two has been rich in theatricals; Miss Stephens in Love in a Village, where the scene opens with those two young beauties sitting in a bower of roses like a flower stuck in the stomacher of beauty, and where that unconscious siren ‘warbles her native wood-notes wild’ with such simplicity and sweetness; Charles Kemble in the Inconstant, who in one glorious scene plays tragedy and comedy to the life, and in one short moment tastes the ‘fierce extremes’ of pleasure and agony, of life and death; and Othello, with bumpers and three times three; to say nothing of Madame Vestris in the Invincibles, and Mr. John Reeve in the immortal Major Sturgeon. Why then did we take no notice of them? Notice we have taken, but it has been with ‘our mind’s eye,’ in ‘our heart’s core.’ Ill will it fare with us, when we do not cast a sidelong glance at those pregnant abridgments, the play-bills, and when their flaunting contents, that unfold to us the map of our life, no longer excite a smile or a sigh. Any one who pleases may then write our epitaph, though it will not be worth writing. At such a season, for instance, we saw Mrs. Siddons in such a part for the first time; in such another, Kemble walked with regal air across the stage, and his stately brow needed no diadem to set it off; in such a character Bannister was in all his glory; in that, Suett vented his resistless folly; here, Munden went the whole length of his face; here, Lewis was all life and air; here, Jack Palmer was great indeed; here, King was bitter in Touchstone, and Miss Pope romantic in Audrey; then, Mrs. Goodall played the part of Rosalind, and tripped in becoming page’s attire through the forest of Ardennes (days and years long past!); here, Dignum warbled as Amiens (before we had heard of the peace of Amiens); and here, Mrs. Jordan’s laugh comes over the heart, and if it has grown dry and seared, fills it with the remembrance of joy and gladness once more. Dodd and Parsons hover in the extreme verge of the horizon, but gay shadows, airy shapes. Then such a one took leave of the stage, drawing a narrower circle within the natural circle of his being; then Liston appeared in the Finger-Post, looking like a finger-post, with his nose only pointing to fun; Elliston in Wild Oats (will he never sow ’em?); Matthews in the Bee-Hive, as busy as a bee; Miss Kelly in chambermaids; Miss O’Neill in heroines; last, not least, Mr. Kean, the ‘bony prizer’ of the stage, who has knocked all other reputations and his own on the head. What a host of names and recollections is here! How many more are omitted, names that have embodied famous poets’ verse and been the ‘fancy’s midwife,’ that have gladdened a nation and made life worth living for, that have made the world pass in review as a gaudy pageant, and set before us in a waking dream the bodily shapes and circumstances of all that is most precious in joy or in sorrow! And is it come to this, that the drama is accounted vulgar by the vulgar, and that we are to cut our old acquaintances the players, those who have thrown a light upon the morning, noon, and evening of our day, ‘gay creatures of the element, that live ‘i th’ rainbow and play in the plighted clouds,’ and who have taken us so many hundred times to sit and laugh with them, or shed ‘tears such as angels weep,’ at a height where we could look down at the sordid of the earth—and at a universe of Operas, with their naked figurantes, and sense and soul muffled up in sound to suit the callous taste or ranker gust of ears polite! We may have said all this before; and here lies the misfortune of our office. A theatrical audience is supposed to vary every night: the reading public is assumed to be always the same body. We could praise Mr. Charles Kemble’s acting in Young Mirabel every time he does it, and are always glad to think he is going to play what does such credit to his art and gives such pleasure to others; but we can say nothing about it, having once expressed our opinion to that effect. An actor repeats a favourite part till farther notice; a singer may be encored in an air as often as his friends please; thank God, we have stockpieces that never wear out: but who ever ventured upon reviving a defunct criticism? It might pass with the million, but some good-natured friend would betray us. The writer’s secret would be found out, and he would be had up as an imposter. Nevertheless, having meditated a new criticism (or eulogy, for it is the same thing) on Mr. Kean’s Othello, and the overflowing house having excluded us from the Free-List, we venture upon borrowing an old one; and if we were to try, we do not know that we could mend our draught.
‘Mr. Kean’s Othello is, we suppose, the finest piece of acting in the world. It is impossible either to describe or praise it adequately. We have never seen any actor so wrought upon—so “perplexed in the extreme.” The energy of passion, as it expresses itself in action, is not the most terrific part: it is the agony of his soul, shewing itself in looks and tones of voice. In one part, where he listens in dumb despair to the fiend-like insinuations of Iago, he presented the very face, the marble aspect of Dante’s Count Ugolino. On his fixed eyelids “horror sat plumed.” In another part, where a gleam of hope or of tenderness returns to subdue the tumult of his passions, his voice broke in faultering accents from his overcharged breast. His lips might be said less to utter words than to distil drops of blood gushing from his heart. An instance of this was in his pronunciation of the line—
“Of one that loved not wisely, but too well.”
The whole of this last speech was indeed given with exquisite force and beauty. We only object to the virulence with which he delivers the last line, and with which he stabs himself—a virulence which Othello would neither feel against himself at the moment, nor against the “turbaned Turk” (whom he had slain) at such a distance of time. His exclamation on seeing his wife, “I cannot think but Desdemona’s honest,” was the “glorious triumph of exceeding love,” a thought flashing conviction on his mind, and irradiating his countenance with joy, like sudden sunshine. In fact almost every scene or sentence in this extraordinary exhibition is a master-piece of natural passion. The convulsed motion of the hands, and the involuntary swelling of the veins in the forehead, in some of the most painful situations, should not only suggest topics of critical panegyric, but might furnish studies to the painter or sculptor.’
After Othello on Wednesday, The Mayor of Garratt followed ‘with kindliest change.’ Mr. Reeve played Major Sturgeon, and Mr. Keeley, Jerry Sneak. Comparisons are odious: therefore they are made. Mr. Keeley’s Jerry was not so good as Russell’s formerly; nor Mr. Reeve’s Major Sturgeon equal to Dowton’s. This is saying nothing, for both those performances were of the very first water. Mr. Keeley’s person is diminutive, and he seems the natural butt of a virago: Russell was a goodly man of his inches; it was his spirit only that was hen-pecked, and that submitted to buffets and blows. Dowton again was the model of a train-band Captain in his own esteem, and never doubted of the ineffable superiority of his own pretensions: Reeve, in the midst of his insolence and vapouring, has a look of quizzing himself, and sees through the ridicule of his own character. He however throws much humour and fantastic absurdity into the part, à-la-Liston; but his drollery is conscious and knowing, not vacant and absolutely spontaneous, like that of his unrivalled prototype. At the end of the farce, there was some division of opinion whether the piece was not low, as if that which had mainly driven such manners and characters almost from the knowledge of the present generation was not a master-stroke of genius, and in fact an historical drama.