The Profligate: A Play in Four Acts

by Arthur Wing Pinero

But the theatrical career of “The Profligate” was to take a wider range. The voice of the British dramatist was to be heard in the land of the foreigner; but it spoke in the necessarily mimetic tones of adaptation, and the tongue was Dutch. “The Profligate,” bearing the title of “De Losbol,” was produced in Amsterdam on November 30, 1889, under the personal supervision of Mr. J. T. Grein, at the Municipal Theatre, which has since been burnt down. Only a partial success is to be recorded, the play having enjoyed but a brief career, as it did also at the Hague, where the production took place at the Royal Theatre. The Dutch critics were for the most part patronising and lukewarm, patronising because the play was English, lukewarm because the author had not treated his theme after the cynical and pessimistic methods of certain modern French writers. But one of the most prominent critics of Holland was fain to admit, in the Algemeen Handelsblad of Amsterdam, that “viewed from an English standpoint, ‘The Profligate’ may certainly be called a remarkable drama,” and that “it is a legitimate play with a properly worked-out plot, although it contains a good deal of coincidence, and shows a want of spirit in the dialogue.”

“The Profligate” is next heard of in Germany, where “The Magistrate” and “Sweet Lavender” already enjoyed popularity; but there the voice of the author was almost lost in the falsetto tones of the adapter. Dr. Oscar Blumenthal, a well-known German littérateur and the popular director of the Lessing Theatre in Berlin, undertook to introduce Mr. Pinero’s play to German playgoers. But Dr. Blumenthal has won reputation as a wit and a humorist, and any work from his pen must make his audience laugh before everything; so he appears to have adopted very drastic measures in preparing “The Profligate” for the German theatre. He has in fact transformed a serious drama of English life into a frivolous comedy of Parisian manners; innocence is turned into intrigue, the betrayed maiden becomes the scheming adventuress, the play terminates with a laugh, and it is called “Falsche Heilige”—which may be translated as “False Saints.” But the result is popular success.

The first performance took place on Friday, February 13, of the present year, at the Stadttheater, Hamburg, and a perfect triumph was achieved, adapter and actors were called before the curtain no less than twenty times, and the press unanimously belauded the “author”—Dr. Blumenthal. Performances then followed with equal success at Altona, Stettin, Graz, München, Dresden, Hildesheim, and Lübeck, and on Saturday, August 29, 1891, “Falsche Heilige” was produced in the German capital at Dr. Blumenthal’s own Lessing Theatre. The reception by Berlin playgoers and critics was as enthusiastic as it had been elsewhere, and the glory of the adapter was everywhere. And this is to spread still further, for the play is to visit all the other important theatrical towns of Germany.

This summarises so far the Continental career of “The Profligate,” but in all probability it will penetrate much further. As a modern instance of the vagaries of adaptation, the following German criticism of “The Profligate” in its Teutonic dress may be found amusing, in connection with the English text of the play:—

“The German author may be indebted to the English original of ‘Falsche Heilige’ for the plan of the piece, and the material for the several acts, but in the entire modelling, in its general character, and in all its merits, it is the play of Blumenthal. It is insinuating and amusing, persuading by fluent, elegant, refined diction, and especially by the sparkling firework witticisms of Blumenthal, which rise like rockets in every scene, while the dramatic aplomb is preserved throughout the grand scene in the third act, which did not fail to impress, as the author intended. Blumenthal has shifted the action of the story into the salons of aristocratic Parisian society, and the strongly perfumed atmosphere of the bons-vivants and the grisettes of Paris, where comfort-loving fathers and guardians compare their marriage-hunting daughters or wards to ‘freckles,’ which (as the German Hugh Murray says) ‘scarcely got rid of, make their reappearance.’ The ornaments of the Boulevards are the main characters of the play, but the author (Blumenthal) nowhere disgusts a sensitive listener. He tones down the conversation of the circle, and accentuates its fascinating features, utilising it as a frame for setting his brilliant coruscating jokes. He places contrastingly by the side of the frivolous Don Juan the sentimentally virtuous Paul Benoit, and by the side of the cunning and false Magdalen the innocent child Jeanne de Lunac. The piece is full of rich veins of light and cheerful amusement.”

The Australian career of “The Profligate” has been both experimental and successful. Mr. Charles Cartwright and Miss Olga Nethersole produced the play at the Bijou Theatre in Melbourne on Tuesday, June 9, of the present year, and for the first time it was acted in the original version, as now printed. The play ended with Dunstan Renshaw’s suicide, a dénouement which the Melbourne critics accepted as “more powerfully dramatic” than the reconciliation, but the impression produced upon the public was considered too painful, and on the following Thursday evening the ending of the Garrick version was substituted for the original, and “gave greater satisfaction to the public.” Consequently, this is how the play was presented on Tuesday, August 4, 1891, at the Garrick Theatre in Sydney, where it achieved very considerable success, and aroused critical enthusiasm, while it was even then urged that the substitution of the “happy ending,” though managerially politic, was calculated to “detract from the actual merits of the play.”

Malcolm C. Salaman.

London, November 1891.