No sooner has the doctor left than Deburau calls for his hat and his stick. He will no longer sit idle while inferior men play his parts. He is going back to the theater. There we find him in the last act in the middle of a performance in one of his most famous rôles, but his old grace and agility are gone. When the audience should weep it laughs and there are tears instead of smiles for his decrepit attempts at comedy. Finally, he is hissed and booed and, after he has made a dumb speech of farewell, the curtain is rung down. The manager is in a panic. Somebody else must be put forward. It is quite evident that Deburau is done. In the crisis the old actor begs a favor. His son, he tells the manager, knows all his rôles. Why not let the audience have a new Deburau, a young Deburau? Then, as the company gathers about to listen, the old man makes up the boy for his part, and as he does so he tells him in a few simple words the secrets and the fundamentals of the art of acting. Presently the drum of the barker is heard outside the theater and the audience hears him announce that Deburau the great will give way to a greater Deburau, a Deburau more agile, more comic, more tragic. Then the terrified boy is pushed out upon the stage and the play begins.
By an ingenious device of David Belasco all our attention is focused upon the old man, who is listening and watching the performance of his successor, which we see only dimly through gauze curtains, but we hear the laughter and the shouts and the cheers. The new Deburau is a success, a triumph. The noise comes more faintly to our ears and we see only the old Deburau standing listening as from the house which has just hissed him there comes a wild acclaiming shout for his successor of "Deburau! Deburau!"
The old man does not know whether he should laugh or cry, and so he cries.
A Reviewer's Notebook
There is an amazing simplicity about great events. Creation week was clear, calm and quiet. Hardly a ripple was on the Rubicon the afternoon that Cæsar crossed. Even Babylon fell softly and bounced only once. In the same spirit Pierre V. R. Key started John McCormack: His Own Life Story.
"It was a summer's day, with the sun shining," writes Mr. Key, "when we began. McCormack sat on the veranda of Rocklea, his Noroton, Connecticut, villa, gazing out upon the waters of Long Island Sound. He had sat that way for some minutes, in a suit of tennis flannels, his stalwart body relaxed in an armchair. I waited for his opening words. 'What a debt a man owes to his mother and father,' he said."
Mr. Key's admiration for McCormack we found later on rests on unassailable grounds. "He began to sing," Key writes, "he sings to-day—and will go on singing until he dies—for just one reason alone: God meant that he should sing."
We trust it will not be considered an impiety if we express a curiosity as to whether the nasal quality was included in God's intention.
We have forgotten what Aristotle or Clayton Hamilton or any of the others have set down as the first rule for playwrights, but it seems to us that it ought to be: Get O. P. Heggie. It makes no difference what the part may be, court dandy, early Christian or conjuror, Heggie is your man. The only disturbing factor is that into every rôle this actor brings a sort of spiritual animation. If you chance to call upon him to fall down stairs he will do it splendidly, missing not a single bump, and the audience will laugh its bellyful, but it will also have the feeling that in some curious way the thing has become exalted, that after all it may be the heart instead of the gizzard which is breaking under the emotion of the moment. Giving sawdust to this man is dangerous business, for the first thing you know he has changed it into blood.