Covent-Garden.
On Tuesday, the Beggars’ Opera was acted here; or rather, half the Beggars’ Opera to half a house. This is as it should be: if the Managers start and shrug up their shoulders at one half of a play, the public will shrink from the other. It is always wrong to cry stale fish. We suspect some clerical critic, some Jeremy Collier of the Times, has had a hand in this: what have these reverend divines to do with profane stage-plays, any more than poets and novelists with writing lay-sermons? Everything in our day is turned topsy-turvy: nothing prevails but ‘vanity, chaotic vanity.’ The consequence of this sort of slur and neglect thrown upon the piece is, that it is indifferently acted. There is not, in the expressive green-room phrase, ‘a hand in the house’: and without that, the performer has no heart to proceed. A player can no more act with spirit unless he sees the reflection of his excellences in the looks and satisfaction of the audience, than a fine lady can dress without a looking-glass. He makes a hit and it fails of effect; he is therefore thrown out, and the next time he does wrong or he does nothing. Filch (Meadows) picks a pocket as if he was afraid of being detected by the pit: Miss Kelly is shocked at the part of Lucy, and flounces and elbows through it as if she wished to get out of it, putting a negative on an encore that is likely to detain her five minutes longer in Newgate: Miss Stephens (the charming Polly) is frightened at the interest she might inspire, and is loth to ‘waste her sweetness on a blackguard air’: the Captain (Mr. Wood) is the only person who stands fire on the trying occasion. This gentleman is the best Macheath we have seen for a long time (for in criticism as in law we must have our statute of limitations)—more of a gentleman than Incledon, a better singer than Davies, less affected than Young, less finical than Sinclair, as ‘pretty a fellow’ as Madame Vestris—good-looking, gallant, debonair, and vocal. Bartley is too ‘splenetic and rash’ for Lockitt, who should be sullen and hardened as his prison-walls; Blanchard is not round and set enough for Peachum, his figure dangling and his voice crackling like a lawyer’s parchment; Mrs. Davenport alone remained in her original muslin apron, silk gown, and pinners (a Sybil, yet how unlike a prophetess!) to overlook and wonder at the desolation of the classic scene. We are more and more convinced that there is a time for everything, and that good plays must give place to bad ones. It is not possible (with a mixed audience) to keep alive the ridicule of manners after the manners themselves have ceased, nor to preserve them in the spirit of wit, or exhibit them even in mock-heroics. The stage is but the counterpart of existing follies—
‘And when the date of Nock was out,
Off fell the sympathetic snout.’
However, the Beggars’ Opera has run a century. That’s pretty well. Oh George Colman the Younger, Messrs. Reynolds and Morton, how will you rejoice, could you lift up your heads a hundred years hence, and see a five-act play of yours cut down to a one-act farce! It is not that there are not plenty of rogues and pick pockets at present; but the Muse is averse to look that way; the imagination has taken a higher flight; wit and humour do not flow in that dirty channel, picking the grains of gold out of it. Instead of descending, we aspire; and the age has a sublime front given to it to contemplate the heaven of drawing-rooms and the milky-way of fashion. You are asked if you like Fielding, as if it were a statuteable offence; and it was justly observed the other day in a comparison between De Vere and Count Fathom, that in a refined period like ours, a rogue aims at nothing short of being Prime-Minister! In a word, the French Revolution has spoiled all, like a great stone thrown into a well ‘with hollow and rueful rumble,’ and left no two ideas in the public mind but those of high and low. The jealousy of gentility, the horror of being thought vulgar, has put an end to the harmless double-entendre of wit and humour; and the glancing lights and shades of life (nothing without each other) are sunk into the dull night of insipidity and affectation. So be it, and so it will be! Yet ‘we have heard the chimes at midnight’ for all this, and passed over Hounslow and Bagshot, not without a twinge of the recollection of other times, as well as responsive to the names of Pope, of Gay, and Queensberry’s Duchess! Nor is it so long since we have seen good company and full houses grace the representation of Tyburn tree: we remember old Sir John Sylvester among others (with we believe his two daughters) who had a keen relish for an execution, and stedfastly contemplated under black bushy eyebrows that irrefragable order of ideas (as Mr. Hobbes calls it) ‘the thief, the judge, and the gallows;’ and Mr. Vansittart, who smiled with conscious simplicity at the satirical allusions to Ministers of State, might be supposed to be comparing the terseness and point of Gay’s style with his own ‘wolds and sholds,’ and seemed to think that nothing but an evangelical housebreaker was wanting to the perfection of the plot!—We could not stay out A Race for Dinner, though invited by Mr. Wrench,—who has become as hungry as a hunter of late,—but made the best of our way to the other house (old Drury) in search of a criticism. We could almost fancy Covent Garden had got there before us, for there we found nearly the whole former strength of the rival house drawn up in battle-array before us—‘and Birnamwood was come to Dunsinane’—through what bickerings, what strifes, what heart-burnings, what jealousies between actors, what quarrels with managers, what want of pay, and demands for more, is easy (though not pleasant) to guess. They had also brought the Poor Gentleman with them; and both together brought a full house. Nothing could be better acted. Looking at them with ‘eyes of youth’ (which we always take with us to the theatre) we seemed as it were to witness something like a turn-out of Chelsea pensioners on the boards; and the sentiments of the play were of a piece with this patriotic and charitable impression. About thirty years ago, when John Bull took a particular fit of hatred against the French, he also fell in love with himself; and the dramatic writers of that day undertook to shew John his own face, his virtues or vices ‘to advantage dressed’ in a succession of plays which were properly Dedications to the English nation. We have the Whole Duty of Man bound up in a coarse, unattractive exterior; the Virtues in the front of the stage, though the Graces stand a little in the back-ground; and all the charities of private life clustering together on the stage, as they do round the domestic hearth. We have nothing but generous uncles, dry in their manner, but their heart and their purse overflowing with liberality—dutiful nephews, thoughtless but well-meaning, and falling into scrapes and love at every turn—reclaimed seducers—exemplary young ladies—old servants surly, but honest (the English character)—a chattering apothecary, the butt of the village and a foil to our self-love—an old soldier, a favourite in the family, and with us, for he has been wounded in our defence—a poor gentleman, in want of money which he refuses by mistake from some munificent patron, in consequence of not being so shrewd as the audience, and who is in hourly danger of a prison, from which we hope to escape. All this hits our delicate and improved moral tastes much better than sneering at our vices or laughing at our follies. Live sentiment, perish satire! Then there is so much distress, which it is so delightful to sympathize with—so much money circulating to relieve it (which it is so delightful to hear and to see; it is almost like attending a charity-sermon, or seeing Mr. Irving himself pawn his watch out of an excess of missionary zeal)—then there are so many tears starting into the eye, so many squeezes of the hand, so many friends and relations falling into one another’s arms, as cannot but move the most obdurate—so many bailiffs in the wind, so many duels broken off by the entrance of some antiquated spinster who is always prying into mischief, or of some charming young creature who is the cause of it. We hope the other actors and actresses who acquitted themselves so admirably in their several parts,—Mr. Dowton in Sir R. Bramble, Mr. Mathews in Ollapod, Mr. Liston in Corporal Foss, Mr. Cooper in Lieutenant Worthington, Mr. Jones in Frederic, Mrs. Davison in Miss Mactab,—will excuse us if we pass them over on this occasion to pay our compliments to Miss Ellen Tree, who played Emily Worthington, and who certainly comes under the description of persons last-mentioned. Without any appearance of art, she played so well that she seemed the character itself, with the ease and simplicity of an innocent school-girl. Her figure is very pleasing—her voice is like her sister’s—and she has the handsomest mouth in the world. We will not attempt to describe it for two reasons: first, because we cannot; secondly, because we dare not. In Mr. Jones’s School for Gallantry she might have been called the bon bouche. Amidst the chopping and changing of the theatres, we had forgotten Mr. Jones was at Drury Lane; and inquired after the success of his new piece at Covent Garden. We naturally enough received an answer almost as cold as the moon which shines through the bars of his hero’s prison-chamber. We were glad however to find that the wit and pleasantry diffused over it, if faint, had much of the agreeable lustre of that mild planet. We should suppose the plot borrowed from the country where the scene is laid. Cupid seems always on garrison-duty in the Prussian monarchy, and the spirit of adventure and gallantry somewhat languishes and grows trifling when it is kept (as everything there is) under lock and key. After what we have said of Miss E. Tree, we will not forfeit our reputation for gallantry by saying anything less obliging of Miss Love, who plays a young hussar officer in this piece, than that we like her best when she is drest most like herself.
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW AND L’AVARE
| The Examiner.] | [May 18, 1828. |
Drury Lane.
The Taming of the Shrew was revived here on Wednesday, with the original words and additional songs. We however missed Christopher Sly, that supreme dramatic critic, who should have sat in lordly judgment on the piece, and given a drunken relief to it. This representing of a play within a play (of which Shakspeare was fond) produces an agreeable theatrical perspective—it is like painting a picture in a picture—and intimates pointedly enough that all are but shadows, the pageants of a dream. We also missed Mr. Liston in this part; for we understand he has some good quips and crotchets about it. Unless we saw him, we cannot pretend to say how he would do it; for we consider Mr. Liston in the light of an author rather than of an actor, and he makes his best parts out of his own head or face, in a sort of brown study, with very little reference to the text. He has nevertheless more comic humour oozing out of his features and person than any other actor in our remembrance, or than we have any positive evidence of since the time of Hogarth. No one is stultified, no one is mystified like him—no one is so deep in absurdity, no one so full of vacancy; no one puzzles so over a doubt, or goes the whole length of an extravagance like him—no one chuckles so over his own conceit, or is so dismayed at finding his mistake:—the genius of folly spreads its shining gloss over his face, tickles his nose, laughs in his eyes, makes his teeth chatter in his head, or draws up every muscle into a look of indescribable dulness, or freezes his whole person into a lump of ice (as in Lubin Log) or relaxes it into the very thaw and dissolution of all common sense (as in his Lord Grizzle). Munden’s acting (which many prefer, and in this number may be included Mr. Liston himself) was external, overdone, and aimed at the galleries—it was a sort of prodigious and inspired face-making—Liston’s humour bubbles up of itself, and runs over from the mere fulness of the conception. If he does not go out of himself, he looks into himself, and ruminates on the idea of the idle, the quaint, and the absurd, till it does his heart good within him, and makes ‘the lungs of others crow like chanticleer.’ Munden’s expressions, if they could have been taken off on the spot, would have made a capital set of grotesque masks: Liston’s would make a succession of original comic sketches, as rich as they are true:—Mr. Wilkie failed in attempting one of them—his pencil was not oily and unctuous enough. We have seen many better comedians, that is, better imitators of existing or supposed characters and manners—such as Emery, Little Simmons, Dowton, and others—we know no other actor who has such a fund of drollery in himself, or that makes one laugh in the same hearty unrestrained manner, free from all care or controul, that we do with Sancho Panza or Parson Adams. We have heard a story of Mr. Liston being prevented by some accident from attending his professional duties, and wrapping himself up in a flannel gown and heart’s-content over a winter fire, to read our good old English novelists for a fortnight together. What fine marginal notes his face would make! Which would he enjoy most, the blanket falling and discovering philosopher Square behind it, or the drawing up of the curtain and the broad laugh of the pit? We will answer that question for him. The meanest apprentice that sees a play for the first time from the gallery, has more pleasure than the most admired actor that ever trod the stage: there is more satisfaction in reading one page of a sterling author with good faith and good will, than the writer had in the composition or even the success of all his works put together. The admiration we bestow on others comes from the heart; but never returns back to it. Vanity closes up the avenues, or envy poisons it. This digression is too long: without sometimes going out of our way, we should hardly get to the end of our task.—The revival, on the whole, went off pleasantly, though the acting was not remarkably good, nor the music by any means enlivening. Jaques’s recommendation to Amiens—‘Warble, warble,’—seems to be the device of most modern composers, who think that, if they string a set of unmeaning notes together, it must be heavenly harmony. ’Tis pitiful. We are sick to death of this interpolated sing-song; nor do we think it much mended by proceeding from the mouth of Mr. Braham, who is in such cases a piece of operatic fleecy hosiery. He is a walking woolsack:—‘And when the bag was opened, the voice began to sing,’ &c. We may be wrong in this matter, and speak under correction of better judges; but we confess that the everlasting monotonous alternation of the thunder of the spheres and the softness of nightingales, of the notes of the trumpet and the lute, the forked lightning and gentle moon-beams, Mr. Braham’s thick-set person, infantine gestures and dying cadences, all together throw us into a fit of despondency. Miss Fanny Ayton’s shrill voice and acute features did not serve to dispel our chagrin. The rest of the piece was tolerably cast. Wallack was the hero of it, who does not want for spirit or confidence; and a man’s good opinion of himself is always half-way towards deserving it, and obtaining that of others. Cooper did not play his pretended master well: he is too grave and straight forward an actor for these sort of sudden shifts and doubtful subterfuges. The best-done scene was the quarrel between Russell as the tailor, and Harley as Petruchio’s man, about the gown and cap. The quaint antique humour was happily hit off, and studiously dallied with, so as not to slur it over, but to bring it out. Some fastidious critics may object to the puerile conceit and tenuity of meaning that pleased our ancestors in such idle squabbles—we think we could cite graver polemics to match it in shabby excuses and verbal trifling in the present day. The old-fashioned dresses recalled the image of former times; and the scenery that of places, which can never grow old. The last scene, in which the brides are sent for and brought in, had an excellent effect; and the second representation was announced with every sign of satisfaction. It may not be improper to add here, that the Taming of the Shrew is one of the pieces that have been transplanted (not without a good deal of pruning) to the French stage, and that Mademoiselle Mars plays the part of Katharine with equal spirit and success.
(French Play.)