‘THE PANNEL’ AND ‘THE RAVENS’

The Examiner.][February 2, 1817.

There has been little new this week. A new after-piece or melo-drame has been brought forward at Covent-garden, and the old farce of the Pannel revived at Drury-Lane. We can say but little in praise of the former, except the excellence of the acting and the manner in which it is got up. The strength of the house is mustered in a second-rate production, and from the list of names in the play-bills, the public go to see the performers, if not the performance, and come away at least half satisfied. They manage these things differently at Drury-lane, and not so well. We deny that the comic strength of the two houses is so unequal as is sometimes supposed. For instance, at Drury-lane, they have Munden, Dowton, Oxberry, and Knight; Harley is droll too; and in women, they beat them out and out, for they have Miss Kelly. To be sure, they have not Liston; so they must kick the beam. Mr. Liston is the greatest comic genius of the age. If we were very dull and sad indeed, we should avoid going to any farce or comedy in which he did not appear, as only tantalising to our feelings, and promising relief without affording it: but we must be dull indeed, if we did not bite at the bait of Mr. Liston’s Lubin Log. His comic humour is a sort of oil or ‘balsam of fierabras’ for all imaginary wounds that are not a foot deep. His laugh might tickle royalty itself after the howling of the rabble, or make one of the wax figures at Mrs. Salmon’s relax from the inflexibility of its state. Then there is Miss Stephens at Covent-garden, and there are the three Miss Dennets—like ‘Circe and the Sirens three.’ We always see the Miss Dennets at the theatre, and they sometimes glide before our imagination at other times; but we seldom hear Miss Stephens now. We want to see her again in Mandane, in which we have seen her eight times already, and to hear her sing If o’er the cruel tyrant Love, which we could hear her sing for ever. We want to see her in Polly for the seventh time, and in Rosetta for the fifth, we believe it will be, when we see her in it again, which will be when she next plays in it. Pray how long will it be first, Mr. Fawcett? We suppose not till Miss O’Neill is tired of tiring the audience in Mrs. Oakley, or ‘the ravens are hoarse that croak over Mr. Emery’s head’ in the Pangs of Conscience. Something new, always something new. That is the taste of Covent Garden, and the town. It is not our’s. We are for something old. Toujours perdrix. We like to read the same books, and to see the same plays, and the same faces over again—always provided we liked them at first. Now there is one face which we never liked, and never shall like, which is the face of Tyranny, and the older it gets, the uglier it gets in our eyes, and in this, as a matter of taste, we differ entirely with Mr. Canning, though he has been declared by a classical authority to be ‘the most elegant mind since Virgil.’ We differ with him notwithstanding.—The Ravens, or the Pangs of Conscience, is a melo-drame taken from the French, of the same breed, but an inferior specimen, as the Maid and Magpie, and the Family of Anglade. It is a kind of renewal of the age of augury adapted to the modern theories of probability, by being reduced within the limits of natural history. These pieces take for their text the lines,

‘And choughs and magpies shall bring forth

The secret’st man of blood.’

In the Pangs of Conscience, as in the Maid of Palisseau, there is a robbery, a trial of persons innocently suspected of it, and a discovery of the real perpetrators, just at the critical moment, by the intervention of two of the feathered creation. Just as sentence has been pronounced on the supposed criminals (Terry and Blanchard) by the Judge, (Barrymore, who really performed this character admirably) two Ravens fly in upon the stage, the same who had hovered over the scene of the murder and robbery in the adjacent forest, and by their silent but dreadful appeal to the conscience of Jacques du Noir (Emery), who is not like his cousin Bruno du Noir (poor Farley) a hardened, but a conscientious villain, reveal the mystery of the whole transaction, by which the guilty are punished, and the innocent miraculously escape.—There was some fine and powerful acting by Emery in the part of the repentant assassin. Bruno in vain endeavours to appease and quiet him, but he still roars out lustily to give vent both to the pangs of his conscience and the ‘grief of a wound’ which he has got in the encounter from an old rusty fowling-piece of Fawcett’s, whom they plunder and kill. The greatest part of this romantic fiction is tedious, and the whole of it improbable, but from the goodness of the acting, and some strokes of interest in the situations, it went off with applause. Of the Pannel, we have only room to add that we think Beatrice, who is the subordinate heroine of the piece, the best specimen of Mrs. Alsop’s acting. We saw it from a remote part of the house, and her voice and manner at this distance sometimes reminded us of her mother’s.