“You mean,” we said, trying to speak as cheerfully as we could, “that things are a little bit too much for him.”
“His will,” went on the Great Actor, disregarding our interruption, “is paralysed. He seeks to move in one direction and is hurled in another. One moment he sinks into the abyss. The next, he rises above the clouds. His feet seek the ground, but find only the air—”
“Wonderful,” we said, “but will you not need a good deal of machinery?”
“Machinery!” exclaimed the Great Actor, with a leonine laugh. “The machinery of thought, the mechanism of power, of magnetism—”
“Ah,” we said, “electricity.”
“Not at all,” said the Great Actor. “You fail to understand. It is all done by my rendering. Take, for example, the famous soliloquy on death. You know it?”
“‘To be or not to be,’” we began.
“Stop,” said the Great Actor. “Now observe. It is a soliloquy. Precisely. That is the key to it. It is something that Hamlet says to himself. Not a word of it, in my interpretation, is actually spoken. All is done in absolute, unbroken silence.”
“How on earth,” we began, “can you do that?”
“Entirely and solely with my face.”