THE THEATRE
IBSEN - AND CONGREVE
Tan London theatres are providing us with a fair oppor- tunity of reconsidering Ibsen.
The summer and autumn brought revivals of The Wild Duck and of Ghosts. The Stage Society has Brand on its list for this season. The other day the Lena Ashwell Players gave a quite tolerable performance of An Enemy of the People. They would do well, I think, to confine themselves to the modern—to revivals, or to new plays like the far from despicable John Drayton which they are doing at the Century Theatre this week ; for the tiny stage there is ill-suited to such ambitious attempts as the Julius Caesar with which they struggled in vain a few days ago. Amateurs are at their worst in togas. Finally, as regards Ibsen, we have a new Nora in Miss Madge Titheradge, in the revival of A Doll's House at the Playhouse.
An entirely competent, if not a great, Nora. If Miss
Titheradge is at moments a little unnecessarily arch—that is to say, artificial—we may put that down to the system which condemns a very clever actress, who has made a success in one part, to go on playing the same sort of part, in much the same sort of play, for ever. Miss Titheradge's part has been that of the demure wife who seeks to regain her husband's affection, and does it by pretending not to love him. Traces of this convention are visible in the early scenes of her Nora ; but they are slight and she outlives them, as poor Nora outlived her seeming frivolity which (let us remember) was all the time only the covering of a wonderful courage that enabled her to face so much for a man sublimely unaware of her sacrifice—even when, at the end, it stares him in the face. I thought that Miss Titheradge did not give quite the full force of agony con- cealed in the show passage of the Italian dance, where, I remember, Rejane was particularly fine. This scene is Ibsen's concession to the old dramatic school. In the admirable passage at the Christmas tree, Miss Titheradge can compare very favourably with any of her predecessors whom I remember. But why still—after all these years— must Helmer be overplayed ? I am afraid that Mr. Milton Rosmer makes him out worse than he was. The part almost acts itself if it is given quietly, for Hehuer has such enor- mities of egotism to utter that his manner may be as quiet as an actor can make it. His speech betrays him ! If a florid interpretation be given to this part to-day, the husband of the first emancipated woman becomes a grotesque. It was lucky for Mr. Rosmer that he wore a face-frame of whiskers ! We knew at once that he could not exist in 1925.
In Mrs. Leicester's School, that charming children's book by Charles and Mary Lamb, one of the " young ladies " tells her schoolfellows about her first visit to the play in London—how she saw the green curtain draw up to the sound of soft music and heard a lady dressed in black saying Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast!
One of the best-known extracts from the Book of Familiar Quotations ! The play was The Mourning Bride, and little Miss Emily Barton (about the year 1809) found it " a very moving tragedy."
So it had proved at its production in 1697, when it achieved the prodigious run of " thirteen days without interruption." It continued profoundly to move the eighteenth century period of first-class acting and third-class rhetorical tragedy. And one can see, after last Sunday's one-night revival at the New Scala Theatre, that it must indeed have provided the Siddons, in Zara, the captive, coloured Queen, with a part of jealousy almost as alluring as the Roxane of Racine's Bajazet gave, later, to Rachel.
Much the same situation in both plays—the beautiful captive, in precarious position, who alternately condemns and tries to save the noble prisoner who will not return her love. Unfortunately Congreve was not Racine. Instead of suave and delicate Alexandrines, packed with psychological insight, he gives us a cold marmoreal type of blank verse,
adorned with artificial alliterations here and there, faintly Miltonic at moments, never as feeble and loose as that of many of his predecessors, rarely as ludicrous in effect as the rhymed couplets of an Earl of Orrery, or of any of the then popular providers of Albumazars, Mustaphas, Altamiras, Alexanders and other pseudo-oriental dramas of rant. What was Congreve if not a man of taste ? He did better than most, but not well enough to survive as a poet into the twentieth century. In listening to The Mourning Bride we seem to be constantly on the verge of poetry ; then as con- stantly cheated by an imitative smoothness. These echoes of the real thing deceived the partially deaf ear of Dr. Johnson, who took a reminiscence of Webster's funereal decoration for one of the most impressive passages of English poetry in this very play.
The Mourning Bride exhibits C'ongreve's grave defect as a dramatist, without permitting him to display his greatest merit, which is his wit. Always he picked up his plots ready made. He was no revolutionary. Not for him those faint strivings towards a new type of drama or comedy, revealed, say, by the inferior Lillo in such a play as George Barnwell. Who cares to disentangle or recall the rubbishy intrigue that lies under the enchanting language of The Way of the World? With The Mourning Bride it is the same. Congreve accepts the old tragi-comedy of " recognitions " and revenges. He adds one of the improbable happy endings to which Addison objected in a famous Spectator. But he cannot here cover up his poverty of invention by wit ; and so his one tragedy has ceased to " move," and will never " move " again, until the drama of rant is given a new life by an actor or actress of the grand manner.
We hardly expected to find such acting at the New Scala.
And we did not. But one of the players, Miss Florence Saunders, as the disconsolate lady in black, Almeria, was far above all the others in quiet dignity of gesture and fine elocution. She has made extraordinary progress since I first saw her at the Old Vie. This may be used as an argument by the supporters of repertory as a school for acting.
R. J.
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