We have already objected to this young lady’s recitation, a certain didactic, monotonous twang, and we cannot upon the present occasion recant our criticism. Miss Foote was Violante’s friend, Donna Isabella, and looked and lisped the part very mincingly. Charles Kemble’s Don Felix is one of his best parts. He raves, sighs, starts, frets, grows jealous, and relents, with all the characteristic spirit of an amorous hero; and in the drunken scene with old Don Lopez, where he produces his pistol as the marriage-contract, is particularly excellent and edifying. Fawcett played Lissardo as he plays almost every thing: he chattered like a magpie, and strutted like a crow in a gutter. But Emery’s Gibby was the thing: the genius of Scotland shone through his Highland plaid and broad bluff face: he seemed evidently afraid neither of having his voice heard, nor his face seen. In person he resembled the figure of the Highlander which we see stuck up as a sign at tobacconists’ windows. We never see nor wish to see better acting than this. Emery’s acting is indeed the most perfect imitation of common nature on the stage. Abbott was respectable as Colonel Briton. Mrs. Gibbs’s Flora was what every waiting-woman ought to be.
VENICE PRESERVED
| The Times.] | [October 10, 1817. |
Drury-Lane Theatre.
Otway’s noble tragedy of Venice Preserved was produced here last night. The effect upon the whole was not satisfactory. The novelties of the representation were Mr. H. Johnstone as Pierre, and Miss Campbell (from the Dublin Theatre) as Belvidera. Of Mr. Johnstone’s Pierre, after having seen Mr. Kemble in it, or even Mr. Young, we cannot speak in terms of applause. The character is not one of blunt energy, but of deep art. It is more sarcastic than fierce, and even the fierceness is more calculated to wound others than to shake or disturb himself. He is a master-mind, that plays with the foibles and passions of others and wields their energies to his dangerous purposes with conscious careless indifference. Mr. Johnstone was boisterous in his declamation, coarse in his irony, pompous and common-place in his action. Mr. Rae (as Jaffier), in the famous scene between these two characters, displayed some strong touches of nature and pathos. Miss Campbell, as Belvidera, did not altogether realize our idea of Otway’s heroine; one of ‘the most replenished sweet works of art or nature.’ Her face, though not handsome, is not without expression; but its character is strength, rather than softness. In her person she is graceful, and has a mixture of dignity and ease in her general deportment. Her voice is powerful, but in its higher tones it rises too much into a scream, and in its gentler ones subsides into a lisp, which is more infantine than feminine. In her general style of acting she put us sometimes in mind of Mrs Fawcit, sometimes of Miss Somerville, and more than once of Miss O’Neill. Her delineation of the part, if not sufficiently tender or delicate, was however forcible, impassioned, and affecting. We thought the last scene, in which she goes mad, and digs for her murdered husband in the grave, the best. We should indeed give her the preference over Miss O’Neill in this very trying scene. Her expression of the disordered wanderings of the imagination, and of the last desperate struggles of passion in her bosom, both by the intonations of her voice, and the varying actions of her body, were more natural, and less repulsive than the mere physical violence of Miss O’Neill in the same passage. The play was given out for repetition with some marks of disapprobation from a part of the audience.
SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER
| The Times.] | [October 15, 1817. |
Covent-Garden Theatre.
Goldsmith’s comedy of She Stoops to Conquer was played at this theatre last night: its reception was highly favourable. It bears the stamp of the author’s genius, which was an indefinable mixture of the original and imitative. His plot, characters, and incidents, are all new, and yet they are all old, with little variation or disguise—that is, the writer sedulously avoided common-place, and sought for singularity, but found it rather in the unhackneyed and out-of-the-way inventions of those who had gone before him than in his own stores. His Vicar of Wakefield, which abounds more than any of his works in delightful and original traits, is still very much borrowed from Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. Again, the characters and adventures of Tony Lumpkin and his mother in the present comedy are a counterpart, even to the incident of the theft of the jewels, of those of the Widow Blackacre and her booby son in Wycherley’s Plain Dealer. The change of character and the rustic disguise of Miss Hardcastle, by which she gains her lover, are also a faint imitation of Letitia Hardy in The Belle’s Stratagem. This sort of plagiarism, which gives us a repetition of what are comparatively new and eccentric pictures of human life, is much to be preferred to the dull routine of trite, vapid, every-day common-places: but it is also more dangerous, as the stealing of pictures or family plate, where the goods are immediately identified, is surer of detection than the stealing of bank-notes or the current coin of the realm. Johnson’s sarcasm against some writer that ‘his singularity was not his excellence,’ cannot be applied to Goldsmith’s works in general: but we do not know whether it might not in severity be applied to She Stoops to Conquer. The incidents and characters are, some of them, exceedingly amusing; but it is a little at the expense of probability and bienseance. Tony Lumpkin is certainly a very essential, and unquestionably comic personage; and his absurdities or his humours were very effectually portrayed by Liston. His impenetrability and unconscious confusion of mind and face in reading and spelling out the letter was admirable. Charles Kemble’s bashful scene with his mistress was irresistibly ludicrous, and excellently well played: but still it did not quite overcome our incredulity as to the existence of such a character in such circumstances. It is a highly amusing caricature, a ridiculous fancy, but no more. One of the finest and most delicate touches of real acting we ever witnessed was in the transition of this modest gentleman’s manner to the easy and agreeable tone of familiarity with the supposed chambermaid, which was not total and abrupt, but exactly such in kind and degree as such a character of natural reserve and constitutional timidity would undergo from the change of circumstances. Miss Brunton’s Miss Hardcastle was a very correct and agreeable piece of acting. Mrs. Davenport’s Mrs. Hardcastle was like her acting in all such characters, as good as it could possibly be.