Our Stage and Its Critics / By "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

by Edward Fordham Spence

The player may be made to look up like Napoleon, may follow traditions as to his gestures and mode of speech, but in none of the vast number of plays concerning the wonderful monster has he ever appeared to be a person of genius: whether handled facetiously, as in Mr Shaw's ingenious play The Man of Destiny, or Madame Sans-Gene, pathetically as in the play presented by Mr Martin Harvey, or formidably as in most works, he never seems at all different from any commonplace man put into the like circumstances. Exactly that in which he differed from all others is exactly what cannot be put upon the stage. We have had Nelson, and of course it was quite impassible to get any suggestion of the qualities that made him Nelson.

The modern tendency in the matter seems to be to choose the reprehensible—such, for instance, as Mlle. Mars, Madame de Pompadour, Madame du Barri, and La Montansier, women in the career of whom no doubt there were many dramas, similar, however, to the dramas in the lives of other women of their class less famous and infamous. When, however, they are put upon the stage they cease to be remarkable, and the characters introduced to support them have the same fate; for instance, the Louis XV. at the Savoy does not give the faintest idea of the ineffably vile monarch, whilst no glimpse is shown of the quality which enabled a Du Barri to obtain her tremendous power.

It is always a case of mountain and mouse in these plays; take as an example the Sardou Dante play produced with prodigious drum-beating a while ago at Drury Lane. Who, if names had been altered, would have guessed that the hero of the piece was the author of the immortal poems? There has been hardly a historical play in modern times in which the identity of the famous personages could be guessed except from the names, the make-up, the costumes, and the specific facts; at the best the pieces are tableaux vivants.

Perhaps there is nothing illegitimate in the ambition of the player to pose as one of the mighty dead, and it is rather humility in the author which urges him to seek adventitious interest than vanity that causes him to believe himself really able to give a true idea of a Napoleon. Into such delicate questions it is needless to inquire. The point is that the lives of the great are not more dramatic than the lives of the small. Napoleon at St Helena was not more unhappy than were millions of people of his day. There is a drama as poignant in the history of César Birotteau as in that of Marie Antoinette, as big a tragedy in the career of Whitaker Wright as in that of Napoleon III.

There was a reason, which exists no longer, why the authors of the Middle Ages chose characters of great social status for their principal parts, and even this reason was not altogether well founded. It would be wrong to assert that historical plays ought not to be written, for, whilst not recommending the use of the stage instead of history classes, one can see that a historical play may illustrate ideas that could hardly be presented otherwise.

There is a noteworthy instance in the work of the much-abused Ibsen. The Pretenders is a historical drama amazingly rich in idea; whether the idea of kingship superbly handled in it is an anachronism it is hard to say, or to tell whether the dramatist chose his subject to illustrate his idea or the idea to embellish his subject; but in it, though obviously there is scope for magnificent mounting and interesting detail, one feels that the genius of the author has prevented him from making any sacrifice of the dramatic aspect. He has not chosen a popular historical personage and made him into the hero of the melodrama, as happens in the case of nine out of ten of the so-called historical plays, but has written a drama that demands a royal atmosphere, which he handles admirably.

What a pity that the money lavished upon the Du Barri play—and lavished very cleverly, it must be admitted, so far as the production of beautiful stage-pictures is concerned—was not spent in the mounting of a great drama like The Pretenders, rich in strong acting parts, magnificent in presentation of character, and really illuminated by ideas!

[The Horrible in Drama ]

It has been alleged that The Monkey's Paw, a clever one-act play by Messrs Jacobs and Barker, formerly presented at the Haymarket Theatre, is too horrible for the stage. The part complained of is confined to the last scene of three.

A young man has been killed in a factory, and his body was so mangled by the fatal wheels that even his father was not allowed to see it. Late at night the father, by means of a diabolical talisman—the Monkey's Paw—succeeds in recalling his son to life, and the audience hears a knocking at the door. What is knocking? The mother is making frantic efforts to pull back the bolts. Her son is there, returned from the grave. The father, aware that the talisman, which promised the fulfilment of three wishes, is of a fiendish malignity, guesses that if the door be opened his son will stand before them alive, but fearfully mangled and mutilated, so he is groping upon the floor for the Monkey's Paw, and the audience feels that on the other side of the door is an obscene horror fresh from the grave. There was a sigh of relief in the theatre when the father found the talisman, and, using the last wish, prayed successfully that his son might be dead and at peace.