PEEPS INTO BIBLICAL THEATRICAL LIFE
Arrival of Actor-Manager, Leading Lady, and other members of the cast.
Then there was the Censorship. The Lord Chamberlain intervened pretty frequently in the 'nineties where plays dealing with Scriptural motives came under his scrutiny. Maeterlinck's Mona Vanna was barred on moral grounds, and in 1907 the apparently blameless Mikado was temporarily withdrawn for political reasons. It must be admitted that in these years Punch was less inclined to criticize these interventions when they were aimed at the frank discussion of disagreeable themes than when they sought to restrict the unseemly vivacities of the Variety Stage—witness his continued hostility to the L.C.C. in regard to their licensing policy and his comments on the Puritan protests against the programme at the Empire in 1894. An altered mood, however, is distinctly revealed in a cartoon in 1907 where the Censor is shown preferring the claims of musical comedy to those of the serious drama, and Punch's sympathies are clearly with the latter. Since then, though Scriptural and political plays have not always escaped the ban, restrictions on the didactic drama, where it deals with the "social evil," have been largely withdrawn in deference to modern conceptions of the needs of education and the responsibilities of the State.
English Plays and Foreign Players
To go back to 1893, the three plays which Punch specially singled out for approval were Charley's Aunt, Becket and The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. The nearest approach to criticism is to be found in the notice of the first-named piece, in which, while admitting that Penley was "inimitably and irresistibly funny" throughout two hours of "all but continuous merriment," the writer lays his finger on a real blot—the intrusion of cheap sentimentality. Tennyson's Becket is pronounced a great and genuine success, both for Irving and the author, who had treated the story "with a free hand, a poetic touch and a liberal mind." The opening sentences of the notice, however, illustrate Punch's insuperable inclination to succumb to frivolity. "Becket has beaten the record": and he goes on to speculate how Thomas à Becket would have beaten The Record if that paper had existed in his time and had ventured to criticize him.
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray might be too strong meat for the young person, but it "marked an epoch in our dramatic annals," it was "every inch a play," and revealed in Mrs. Patrick Campbell an actress of exceptional gifts. There is a delightful burlesque of Ibsen in "Pill Doctor Herdal," but Punch did not leave well alone, and in another number furiously denounced The Master Builder (which he had read but not seen). "Of all the weak-kneed, wandering, effeminate, unwholesome, immoral, dashed rot (to quote Lord Arthur Pomeroy in The Pantomime Rehearsal) this is the weak-kneed-est," and so on in the superlative degree with all the other epithets of abuse. This was the year in which Madame Duse made her London début, but Punch did not get beyond a few puns on her name. The visit of Got, Mlle. Reichemberg and other representatives of the Comédie Française is treated less cavalierly, and the rumoured reconciliation of Gilbert and Sullivan suggests the possibilities of a new "Savoy Peace"—"the Reunion of Arts." Sarah Bernhardt, Yvette Guilbert and Réjane were the three bright particular foreign stars in 1894. Sarah Bernhardt was, as we know, an old flame of the susceptible Punch, and though he found Ize l the reverse of exhilarating, homage was paid to the golden voice of the heroine in a graceful cartoon of "Sarah Chrysostoma." Réjane in Madame Sans-Gêne comes in for high but not unqualified praise. She was perfect in the last act, but overdid the canaillerie of her farce in earlier passages, or at least Punch thought so. His tribute to Yvette Guilbert, "the Queen of the 'Café Concert,'" killed two birds with one stone, for it took the form of a very neat and witty adaptation of her famous song, "Les Vierges," at the expense of the "unco' guid" of Glasgow, whose Puritanism had recently aroused the protest of Sir Frederic Leighton and other Academicians:—
Ils défendent tous les desseins
Où l'on peut voir les bras, le sein,
à Glasgow.
Jamais nus; même dans un bain