THE END.
HARE-ING HIS DIPLOMACY.
As I have already conveyed, in a short note last week, the first night of the revival of Diplomacy, viz., Saturday, Feb. 18th, will be for ever memorable in the annals of the English stage in general, and in the reminiscences of Mr. John Hare in particular, whenever he may choose to give them to the public, It will also afford matter for a brilliant chapter in the second or third series of Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft's On and Off the Stage. A great night, too, for the eminent adapters Messrs. Scott and Stephenson, once known as "the Brothers Rowe," who rowed in the same boat.
"Three Men in a boat."
Never, at any time, has this version of the French play been so well cast as it is now at Garrick Theatre, though nervousness told on all the actors, especially on the elder ones, except, apparently, Mrs. Bancroft, in whose performance there was hardly any trace of it, though once she nearly missed her cue while resting awhile at the back of the stage.
The part of Lady Henry Fairfax has literally nothing whatever to do with the plot, and were it not played as it is now, and played so capitally by Mrs. Bancroft, it would be better, for an English audience at least, if omitted entirely, or reduced to a few appropriate lines in pleasant places. An English audience wants the story, when once begun, to go on without any break or interruption; and indeed, but for dramatic effect, an English audience is inclined to resent even the division of a piece into Acts, unless such arrangement is evidently necessitated by some heavy mechanical change of scenery.
So our audiences would decidedly prefer to have the rôles of Lady Henry and The Marquise de Rio Zarès (with her wearisome iteration about "Don Alva," and played with rather too much accentuation by Lady Monckton) reduced to the smallest possible algebraic expression. Mr. Bancroft was the same Count Orloff as he was years ago on the little stage of the old Prince of Wales's Theatre; his action more deliberate than when he was younger and more impetuous; his pauses for meditation longer by a thought or so than of yore; while in his tone and manner there was just a delicately-deepened colouring of the genuine original Bancroftian "Old Master." To Mr. Bancroft, resuscitating our old courtly friend Count Orloff (now Count Orl-on-again), I would address the once well-known line from "Woodman, spare that Tree"—
"Touch not a single bow!"