And those who still have laugh’d, now laugh the more.’
The scene where he is told he is poisoned, and his interview with the drunken apothecary (Mr. Williams), though excellent in themselves, were not so good: for Liston does not play so well to any one else, as he does to himself. The rest of the characters were well supported. Jones, as the younger Pigwiggin, alias Captain Neville, the lover of Liston’s fair inamorata, ‘does a little bit of fidgets’ very well. He is sprightly, voluble, knowing, and pleasant; and is the life of a small theatre, only that he is now and then a little too obstreperous; but he keeps up the interest of his part, and that is every thing. The audience delight to hear his ‘View Halloa’ before he comes on the stage (which is a sure sign of their opinion), and expect to be amused for the next ten minutes. If an actor can excite hope, and not disappoint it, what can he do more? Mr. Russell, as the little French showman, Mr. Farley as Mr. Wadd, and Mr. Connor as a blundering Irish servant, all sustained their parts with great eclat: and so did the ladies. The scene where Jones deceives two of his creditors, Russell and Farley, by appointing each to pay the other, had a very laughable effect; but the stratagem is borrowed from Congreve, who indeed was not the very worst source to borrow from.
The house was crowded to excess to see the new appearances in the Beggar’s Opera; Madame Vestris’s Captain Macheath, Miss R. Corri’s Polly, and Mrs. Charles Kemble’s Lucy, which last, indeed, is an old friend with a new face. Mrs. Kemble was the best Lucy we ever saw (not excepting Miss Kelly, who is also much at home in this part), and she retains all the spirit of her original performances. Miss Kelly plays Lucy as naturally, perhaps more so; but Mrs. Kemble does it more characteristically. She has no ‘compunctious visitings’ of delicacy, but her mind seems hardened against the walls that enclose it. She is Lockitt’s daughter, the child of a prison; the true virago, that is to be the foil to the gentle spirit of Polly. The air with which she throws the rat to the cat in the song has a gusto worthy of one of Michael Angelo’s Sybils; a box on the ear from her right hand is no jesting matter. Her rage and sullenness are of the true unmitigated stamp, and her affected civilities to her fair rival are a parody (as the author intended) on the friendships of courts.—Madame Vestris, as the Captain, almost shrunk before her, like Viola before her enraged enemies. Indeed, she played the part very prettily, with great vivacity and an agreeable swagger, cocking her hat, throwing back her shoulders, and making a free use of a rattan-cane, like Little Pickle, but she did not look like the hero, or the highwayman, if this was desirable in her case. If, however, she turned Macheath into a petit-maitre, she did not play it like Mr. Incledon or Mr. Cooke, or Mr. Braham, or Mr. Young, or any one else we have seen in it, which is no small commendation. Miss Corri sang Cease your funning, and one or two other songs, with sweetness and effect; but, in general, she was more like a modern made-up boarding-school girl, than the artless and elegant Polly. She lisps and looks pretty. The other parts were very respectably filled, but some of the best scenes (we are sorry to say it) were left out.
T.
No. IX
[September, 1820.
Drury Lane.—The following is a play-bill of this theatre, for which we paid two-pence on the spot, to verify the fact—as some well-disposed persons, to prevent mistakes, purchase libellous or blasphemous publications from their necessitous or desperate vendors.
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.—Agreeably to the former advertisement, this theatre is now open for the last performances of Mr. Kean, before his positive departure for America. This evening, Saturday, August 19, 1820, his Majesty’s servants will perform Shakespear’s tragedy of Othello. Duke of Venice, Mr. Thompson; Brabantio, Mr. Powell; Gratiano, Mr. Carr; Lodovico, Mr. Vining; Montano, Mr. Jeffries; Othello, Mr. Kean—(his last appearance in that character); Cassio, Mr. Bromley—(his first appearance in that character); Roderigo, Mr. Russell; Iago, Junius Brutus Booth; Leonardo, Mr. Hudson; Julio, Mr. Raymond; Manco, Mr. Moreton; Paulo, Mr. Read; Giovanni, Mr. Starmer; Luca, Mr. Randall; Desdemona, Mrs. W. West; Emilia, Mrs. Egerton—This theatre overflows every night. The patentees cannot condescend to enter into a competition of scurrility which is only fitted for minor theatres—what their powers really are, will be, without any public appeal, legally decided in November next, and any gasconade can only be supposed to be caused by cunning or poverty.—After which, the farce of Modern Antiques, &c.
A more impudent puff, and heartless piece of bravado than this, we do not remember to have witnessed. This theatre does not overflow every night. As to the competition of scurrility, which the manager declines, it is he who has commenced it. The minor theatres—that is, one of them—to wit, the Lyceum—put forth a very proper and well-grounded remonstrance against this portentous opening of the winter theatre in the middle of the dog-days, to scorch up the dry, meagre, hasty harvest of the summer ones:—at which our mighty manager sets up his back, like the great cat, Rodilardus; scornfully rejects their appeal to the public; says he will pounce upon them in November with the law in his hands; and that, in the mean time, all they can do to interest the public in their favour by a plain statement of facts, ‘can only be supposed to be caused by cunning or poverty.’ This is pretty well for a manager who has been so thanked as Mr. Elliston! His own committee may laud him for bullying other theatres, but the public will have a feeling for his weaker rivals, though the angry comedian ‘should threaten to swallow them up quick,’ and vaunt of his action of battery against them, without any public appeal, ‘when wind and rain beat dark November down.’ This sorry manager, ‘dressed’ (to use the words of the immortal bard, whom he so modestly and liberally patronises) ‘dressed in a little brief authority, plays such fantastic tricks before high Heaven,’—not ‘as make the angels weep,’—but his own candle-snuffers laugh, and his own scene-shifters blush. He ought to be ashamed of himself. Why, what a beggarly account of wretched actors, what an exposure of the nakedness of the land, have we in this very play-bill, which is issued forth with such a mixture of pomp and imbecility! Mr. Kean’s name, indeed, stands pre-eminent in lordly capitals, in defiance of Mr. Dowton’s resentment,—and Junius Brutus Booth, in his way, scorns to be Mistered! But all the rest are, we suppose—Mr. Elliston’s friends. They are happy in the favour of the manager, and in the total ignorance of the town! Mr. Kean, we grant, is in himself a host; a sturdy column, supporting the tottering, tragic dome of Drury-Lane! What will it be when this main, this sole striking pillar is taken away—‘You take my house, when you do take the prop that holds my house’—when the patentees shall have nothing to look to for salvation but the puffing of the Great Lessee, and his genius for law, which we grant may rival the Widow Black-acre’s—and when the cries of Othello, of Macbeth, of Richard, and Sir Giles, in the last agonies of their despair, shall be lost, through all the long winter months, ‘over a vast and unhearing ocean?’ Mr. Elliston, instead of taking so much pains to announce his own approaching dissolution, had better let Mr. Kean pass in silence, and take his positive departure for America without the pasting of placards, and the dust and clatter of a law-suit in Westminster Hall. It is not becoming in him, W. R. Elliston, Esq., comedian, formerly proprietor of the Surrey and the Olympic, and author of a pamphlet on the unwarrantable encroachments of the Theatres-royal, now to insult over the plea of self-defence and self-preservation, set up by his brethren of the minor play-houses, as the resource of ‘poverty and cunning!’—‘It is not friendly, it is not gentlemanly. The profession, as well as Mr. Arnold, may blame him for it:’ but the patentees will no doubt thank him at their next quarterly meeting.
Mr. Kean’s Othello the other night did not quite answer our over-wrought expectations. He played it with variations; and therefore, necessarily worse. There is but one perfect way of playing Othello, and that was the way in which he used to play it. To see him in this character at his best, may be reckoned among the consolations of the human mind. It is to feel our hearts bleed by sympathy with another; it is to vent a world of sighs for another’s sorrows; to have the loaded bosom ‘cleansed of that perilous stuff that weighs upon the soul,’ by witnessing the struggles and the mortal strokes that ‘flesh is heir to.’ We often seek this deliverance from private woes through the actor’s obstetric art; and it is hard when he disappoints us, either from indifference or wilfulness. Mr. Kean did not repeat his admired farewell apostrophe to Content, with that fine ‘organ-stop’ that he used,—as if his inmost vows and wishes were ascending to the canopy of Heaven, and their sounding echo were heard upon the earth like distant thunder,—but in a querulous, whining, sobbing tone, which we do not think right. Othello’s spirit does not sink under, but supports itself on the retrospect of the past; and we should hear the lofty murmurs of his departing hopes, his ambition and his glory, borne onward majestically ‘to the passing wind.’ He pronounced the ‘not a jot, not a jot,’ as an hysteric exclamation, not with the sudden stillness of fixed despair. As we have seen him do this part before, his lips uttered the words, but they produced and were caused by no corresponding emotion in his breast. They were breath just playing on the surface of his mind, but that did not penetrate to the soul. His manner of saying to Cassio, ‘But never more be officer of mine,’ was in a tone truly terrific, magnificent, prophetic; and the only alteration we remarked as an improvement. We have adverted to this subject here, because we think Mr. Kean cannot wisely outdo himself. He is always sufficiently original, sufficiently in extremes, and when he attempts to vary from himself, and go still farther, we think he has no alternative but to run into extravagance. It is true it may be said of him that he is—