THE NEW QUEEN'S THEATRE.
THE New Queen's Theatre opened badly with Mr. Charles Reade's melodramatic play of The Double Marriage, which was as ill adapted to bring out the great powers of the manager (Mr. A. Wigan) as to interest intrinsically by its unnatural plot ; but Mr. Wigan has since far more than retrieved this great mistake. Indeed, the very best acting which London has seen for many years, with one exception, has been seen at the Queen's Theatre since the with- drawal of the first play. In Still Waters Run Deep Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Wigan had both of them full play for their remarkable powers, and Miss Ellen Terrf appeared in a part of some difficulty and pathos with much more than her usual success in characters of that class. Mr. John Mildmay is an old part with Mr. Alfred Wigan, but a part in which he can never weary us. The dry, taci- turn, cool, Lancashire man, suppressing a good deal of feeling under a phlegmatic manner, and always provided with a generous supply of cold water for bounce of any sort, is a character for which he seems born. But in that piece he was even surpassed by Mrs. Wigan,—only, perhaps, because the character which Mrs. Alfred Wigan had to sustain was one of a far less defined character, and one which depended far more on play of countenance and subtlety of manner for its effect. We doubt if we ever saw a more strik- ing piece of acting than Mrs. Alfred Wigan's in the clever, middle-aged aunt, Mrs. Hector Sternhold, who, having been accustomed to manage her niece and her brother, has compromised herself by conceiving a passion for a handsome young swindler, and is well aware both of the folly and the disgrace of the pro- ceeding. Mrs. Wigan's twitching face, when she is divided be..
• The Nature of the Atonement. By John MacLeod Campbell. Second Edition. London: Macmillan. 1867. tween her wish to maintain her superiority in the household and her desire to extricate herself from her delicate situation, the curious mixture of emotion with her middle-aged, worldly cleverness, the play of mouth, and eye, and eyebrow with which she tries to evade the necessity of confessing her folly to her niece's husband, and her complete inability after all to squeeze a confession so humiliating out of herself, constituted a piece of acting,—the more difficult, by the way, on account of the comparative uninterestingneas of the character, — which no one who saw it will fail to remember almost as long as he lives. In finesse of acting—the quality in which Eng- lish acting is so sadly deficient—Mrs. Alfred Wigan's perform- ance in Still Waters Run Deep was almost a marvel. And the after-piece of the second era in the New Queen's Theatre, The First Night, in which Mr. Alfred Wigan acts the part of a French actor, Achille Tabus, Dufard, who is wrapt up in his daughter, and determined by hook or by crook to force her into popularity on the stage, is the perfection of a farce, a farce in the highest degree extravagant in incident, but without the slightest extra- vagance of acting,—the very ludicrousness of the supposed inci- dent bringing out in strong relief the subtlety of the acting. The old man's fantastic vanity, and wit, and devotion to his *laugher, his coarse but clever flatteries to everybody who may help him to give her a trial, his familiar paternities in instructing her how to act her part, the trembling passion of tenderness with which he forces a little sherry, on which he has spant his last sixpence, down her throat, when she is going on to the stage at the critical moment, and his rapture at her success, constitute a masterpiece in the French school of acting,—the school whose permanent aim is to avoid all sorts of extravagance, whether in .rant or gesture, and to express feeling as much as possible by the .side-lights of manner and tone.
For the present,—though we are happy to see by the new announcement that it is only for the present,—the New Queen's Theatre has lost Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Wigan's direct help, and also the gay girlish comedy of Miss Ellen Terry ; but it has got an admirable substitute in Mr. Toole. The new piece, which he acted for the first time last night, Mr. Byron's Dearer than Life, is indeed bad enough in plot, but it gives so great a scope to Mr. Toole's powers, that it bids fair to be a great success in practice. That an honourable old tradesman should avow himself a forger .and thief, in place of his son, in order to save his wife from the anguish of seeing her idol broken to pieces before her eyes, is a wild improbability that the critic cannot forgive ; and there are other absurdities besides this, which all Mr Toole's power cannot conceal. But his acting is as near as possible to perfection of its kind, and the piece has at least the merit of giving it full play. The bourgeois pride in respectability, the hearty domestic affection, the confusion of mind between good feeding and good feeling, the goodnatured ungrammati- -cal chaff with which he keeps his son's gambling friend at a dis- tance without any breach of the tradesman's deeply-implanted -respect for hospitality, the warmhearted but vulgar conviviality, the sudden change to passionate and angry remonstrance when he finds himself alone with his son, the deep twinges of pain which he displays at his son's disrespectful treatment of his father's old friends, and his humorous attempts to cover them, and the agony of his grief when the forgery of which the young man has been guilty is exposed, are all given in a way that, different as it is, constantly suggests Robson. Mr. Toole is far less intense than Robson, far less pathetically grotesque in his anguish, but -even more perfect in his representation of the class manner. Mr. Toole's pathos is less overwhelming, carries away the audience less, is less like a flood, but it is quite as living, and quite as piteous. It is not so much varied with grotesque bursts that heighten the -effect,—but it is more like ordinary emotion of men of the class ie represents. He is admirably supported, too, by Mr. Brough, in Uncle Ben,—a part in which Mr. Brough showed great power as well as humour, and very cleverly supported by Mr. Wyndham and Mr. Irving. Mrs. Dyas is the painful element of the piece. Mr. Toole is great, too, in the farce. Nothing better than the savage bewilderment of the rough working-man, eating away for life at his dinner,—a boiled rabbit, which in lifetime had been known as Old Betsy,'—at the fanatic literary enthusiasm of the visitors who come to see his room because they have heard that it is the birth- place of 'the immortal Podgers,' could be conceived. Here, again, the farce is in the incident, not in the acting. The working-man's rude amazement and disgust are perfect, and never for a moment over-acted.
On the whole, the New Queen's Theatre bids fair to set an ex-
ample to the managements of the other Theatres,—to lead the taste of the day towards a more natural and true, and yet, also, more moving and powerful, style of acting.
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