" ALL FOR LOVE," BY JOHN DRYDEN.—THE PHOENIX SOCIETY.
IN the Prologue to All for Love the reader may remember that Dryden describes himself as " unarmed " because he has for- sworn rhyming. While he constrained himself in his metre to an unaccustomed style the substance of the play itself caught the infection of constraint. We miss the case and spontaneity, the outpourings of that fount of inspiration which Dryden generally commanded. Some of the tirades are magnificent, some of the scenes thematic, some of the characters firmly conceived and vigorously portrayed ; but taken as a whole the play is rather inert, and here and there the machinery of conventions creaks as the play rolls on to its inevitable goal.
To the pomp of much of the verse, to the swing and elan of long rhetorical passages, Mr. Ion Swinley as Marc Anthony did full justice. I know nobody whom I so well like to hear speak verse, and in this production he excelled himself. It must have been so tempting to try to break up the speeches, to seek adventitious means to avoid 'monotony. But Mr. Swinley stuck to it in the high Racine tradition and so gave us a rich rhetorical unity, a rounded, satisfying performince. His diction is beautiful, and he has the ever-to-be-praised art of speaking verse rapidly but so clearly and with such good articulation that every word of Marc Anthony was distinct even in the large Shaftesbury Theatre.
Very rightly the play was dressed and furnished much as it must have been in 1677, the keynote being Roman armour and long, curled wigs. Marc Anthony wore a splendid -green and gold satin suit completely'Engliah but for an added cloak and buskins ; Cleopatra a fine, flowing, hooped and panniered dress, her hair scraped back off the forehead and dressed with pearls : she was a lady out of a Paul Veronese. Miss Ellen O'Malley as Octavia looked very like a picture of Mary of Modena.
Miss Edith Evans, who took the part of Cleopatra, is an actress in whose work all students of the drama who know it must be interested. She has acted on several occasions for the Phoenix Society, giving a wonderful representation of the Venetian courtesan Aquiline in Venice Preserv'd and a fine per- formance as the young woman who runs mad in The Witch of Edmonton, but I do not think that the part of Cleopatra suited her. She should play parts which are humorous or in which the intention of the dramatist is satiric, as in Aquiline. High, ranting, sounding tragedy, with every spark of humour skilfully excluded,- is not suitable to the particular range of her talents. She made Cleopatra a little querulous in her lovelorn distress— for fear, I think, of making Dry den's carefully whitewashed queen seem the wanton that history and Shakespeare thought her. Her power of wearing historical costume is remarkable. She seems to have a complete set of period gestures and poses at her command. Miss O'Malley was effective as the rather disagreeable Octavia. I wish that Mr. Felix Aylmer's appear- ance as Alexas, the queen's eunuch, had been different. He said his lines well, but lacked oiliness.
Miss Edith Craig is to be congratulated on a production which was up to the high standard always achieved by the Phoenix.
This is the Society's eleventh -production. TARN.
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