With the new year has come new luck to the theatres. Covent Garden, and Drury Lane, with their pantomimes, are doing wonderfully well; the new Gaiety, with its brilliant extravaganza un-dresses, and Mr. Alfred Wigan’s admirable acting in the second piece, is, and has been, drawing crowded houses. The Strand, with its old burlesque, The Field of the Cloth of Gold, is taking its share of the luck, and the little Royalty’s novel style of burlesque-drama, Claude du Val, is in for as prosperous if not as lengthy a career as fell to the lot of Black-eyed Susan. The sensation drama is for a time in abeyance until Mr. Watts Phillips produces his next at the Queen’s, and its startling companion at the Holborn. The Princess’s coquetting with Mr. Boucicault, takes up with Mr. Palgrave Simpson, and plays his Marie Antoinette.
Two theatres are playing comedy, pure and simple; rather pure, and peculiarly simple. At the Haymarket, Mr. Buckstone now plays a comedy by T. W. Robertson, entitled Home; and at the Prince of Wales’s Miss Marie Wilton has produced a comedy by the same author, called School. Both are successful, on both a vast amount of praise has been lavished, and about both a great deal of nonsense has been written.
Home is an adaptation of L’Aventurière; and School, is an adaptation of a German piece; a fact of which but for the letters of Veritas, to the Times, most of us would have remained in blissful ignorance.
It matters not one atom to the public whether these plays are in every sense original (as we suppose the author’s Caste was—his third, and, to our mind his best) or are translated literally, or adapted ingeniously from the French, German, Sanskrit, or Hindu. The public, in general, goes to the theatre to be amused, and so long as this end is attained, cares nothing for details, however interesting they may be from a literary or artistic point of view. School and Home satisfy the public, which passes a very pleasant evening in seeing each piece—so far so good. With whom, then, and with what do we find fault? Assuredly with Mr. Robertson, if he has tacitly taken to himself and the praise which generous admiring critics have publicly given him. For what has been specially praised? what has specially attracted their notice in School? Why, the author’s originality of invention and graceful fancies, as displayed in (1) the choice of the old fairy story Cinderella on which to base an idyllic story; (2) the carrying out this idea at the end in fitting the slipper on the girl’s foot; (3) the love-making in the moonlight, when Lord Beaufoy and Bella talk in spooney tones about their shadows. Now it appears that not only has the Cinderella idea not originated in Mr. Robertson’s inner consciousness, but, beside the incident underlying the whole plot, the very name Cinderella was that of the original German play. We regret that facts like these have not been either acknowledged or contradicted by the author. For we are, and have been, glad, in the true interests of English dramatic art, to point to the author of Caste, Ours, and Society, as an original writer whose successful career is a sufficient answer to the taunts of the French dramatists and their admirers amongst ourselves.
The first act of School contains the gem of the piece in the way of dialogue, which rises here to true comedy standard. We allude to the luncheon in the wood, where Lord Beaufoy the beau, and Jack Poyntz converse together. Suggested by the original German or not, it is excellent. The scene is pretty, nothing remarkable; the schoolgirls sing with a unanimity perfectly astonishing, except, perhaps, to German schoolgirls out for a holiday after the foreign-peasant fashion.
The second act is a farce, and a stupid farce, too. Mr. Hare’s performance of the old beau is good, though not up to his previous delineations of character.
The third act is notable for its moonlight love-making scene. The dialogue runs somewhat in this fashion,—
Lord Beaufoy (to Bella), My shadow is taller than yours.
Bella (to Lord B.). Your shadow is shorter than mine.
Lord B. Now we’re together.
Bella. Now we’re apart.
Lord B. Now we’re together again.
Bella. Yes. The jug (a milk jug in her hand) joins us.
Lord B. (with pathos). Yes. But only for a time.
[Exeunt to get the milk.
And, we are told, that Mr. Robertson is a second Douglas Jerrold! No, this is certainly not the parallel. Mr. Robertson, in a way, may be the Antony Trollope of the drama; not as Jerrold, a writer of epigrams, repartees, and sparkling witticisms, but a very lively recorder of such natural conversation as would pass between two ordinary people, in an ordinary situation.
We should be inclined to say that it is upon this absence of style, polish, and turn, that Mr. Robertson especially prides himself. For ourselves we would rather have a comedy be the concentrated essence of conversation, trimmed, pruned, and polished, up to the School for Scandal smoothness and brilliancy.