DRAMA

THE DUCHESS OF MALFI

THE production by the Phœnix Society of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, gave many people an opportunity to make an exhibition of themselves. In the first place, it was somewhat astonishing to find that on the Sunday night the audience, which one might have supposed to have been made up of people of some education, contained many persons who were evidently unaware that Webster wrote at the very beginning of the seventeenth century, and who had gone to the Lyric Theatre expecting to find a classical and not a renaissance tragedy. Perhaps this is being too kind to them; perhaps they thought The Duchess of Malfi was a Revue, or a Viennese Musical Comedy by Leo Fall or Franz Lehar, which, owing to D.O.R.A., could not yet be produced on the ordinary stage. But perhaps they did not even think at all, and their tittering and nudging was merely the manifestation of the vacancy of their minds. Whatever the explanation, it is certainly odd that such people should be—as they presumably were—members of the Phœnix Society. It has been said to me that this section of the audience was composed largely of the profession, to whom Sunday night is their one opportunity of the week to enjoy the role of spectator. I hesitate to believe it. I refuse to believe it, although the notorious and shameful ignorance of many actors and actresses of the dramatic literature of their own country is difficult to forget. But if this is the explanation—and it is an unpalatable one—it also accounts for the reception given—again by a section only of the audience—to Mr. Farquharson's extraordinarily fine effort to grapple with the part of Ferdinand. The rank and file of actors, like the rank and file of musicians, are notoriously poor judges of their own art. They are sound enough when it is a question of merely conventional skill. They know in an ordinary way the difference between the professional and the amateur. Mere clumsiness, roughness, or smoothness of technique they can discern and, to some extent, understand; but even in these matters it is the conventional, the accustomed way of doing a thing rather than the essentially good way of doing it that they judge by. The moment an actor goes outside routine methods he runs the risk of being ridiculed; his slightest faults and exaggerations and mistakes are fastened upon, while what there may be of insight, imagination, and power in his characterisation is completely passed over.

This is what happened to Mr. Robert Farquharson at The Duchess of Malfi. He gave an interpretation of the character of Ferdinand which was a real creative effort of the actor's imagination. Even if he had been less successful than he was in producing the effect he aimed at, he should have met with a respectful attention from his fellow-artists in the audience. But such an attention would have proceeded from an interest in and some glimmer of an understanding of the serious efforts of an artist; whereas these people who disgraced themselves by loudly giggling at Mr. Farquharson were not obviously blind to serious art.

Of Mr. Farquharson's interpretation I will say this. It was essentially sound and convincing. In portraying Ferdinand as a man abnormal, fanatical, and almost insane on the subject of sex, we are made to understand all his subsequent conduct. Ferdinand, as drawn by Webster, is a man of diseased imagination; he is described in the very first scene by Antonio as "a most perverse and turbulent nature"; his very language right from the start is more violent, more imaginative than that of any other character in the play. Sex is an obsession with him; his first words to his sister are:

You are a widow:
You know already what man is;

And his second:

Marry! they are most luxurious
Will wed twice. Their lovers are more spotted
Than Laban's sheep.