THE THEATRE.

" THE WINTER'S TALE" AT THE •SAVOY.

IN any serious criticism of Mr. Granville Barker's production of The Winter's Tale the extravagant indignation which it has excited in some quarters may safely be disregarded. It is no longer possible for critics to fancy that they can dispose of a new development in art by labelling it "revolutionary." Moreover, as a matter of fact, there is little enough in the Savoy production which can fairly be described as a new development. Anyone with even, a slight acquaintance with the modern theatre on -the Continent must be already familial with most of Mr. Barker's " revolutionary " devices. And even in England the productions of the Diaghilev ballet and of Professor Reinhardt—to say nothing of some rare glimpses-of Mr. Gordon Craig's work—might surely have prepared last Saturday's audience for the-surprises awaiting it. In. any ease, revolution or no revolution, a work of art must be judged on its own merits, and not according to any preconceived ideas of aesthetics or history. But we are even tempted to go further and to say that, though a Shakespearean revival may not neces- sarily be good became it is revolutionary, it must be revolution- ary in order to be good. The tradition (if as such it can be described) of Shakespearean -production in England for the last generation has, been beneath contempt. This must not be held to imply that the same is true of Shakespearean sating —though even here but little qualification would be needed. But, at any rate, it may be safely said that the outstanding features of recent Shakespearean productions are lack of gence and lack of beauty. The conventional method of deliver- ing blank verse, as taught by elocutionists, is so monotonous, so slow, and disregards so completely not only the sense but the feeling expressed in the lines, that an audience can scarcely be cajoled into listening for more than a few minutes at a time ; and, since so much of Shakespeare is written in blank verse, the unhappy producer is forced to look elsewhere for means of holding his audience's attention. Accordingly, after cutting out a third of the play, "owing to the exigencies of time," he crowds the stage with elaborate scenery -and clothes, he hires an orchestra to play slow music during the longer speeches, -and every -few minutes he arranges a piece of ingenious " business " to distract the audience from the longueurs of the words. But oven in these necessary corollaries of bad verse-delivery the traditional pro- ducer is at fault. His ideas of beauty have never got beyond the Royal Academy stage, and amorffingly his one idea for the scenery and dresses is photographic realism combined with archaeological correctness. His Julius Caesar must not merely wear a bald wig, hut must be bald; and the palace of Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream must be furnished in precise accordance with Dr. Evans's latest Minoan dis- coveries. But beauty is not to be caught with such nail springes as these, and still less can such crude materials

express the subtle atmosphere of a play by Shakespeare.

All of this Mr. Barker may be supposed to have perceived when he set about his production. It is because be has made an honest attempt to rebel against these conventions that he deserves every encouragement, and it is because he has failed

in his attempt that he deserves reasonable criticism. In the

first place, Mr. Barker has struck at the root difficulty, and has to a great extent abandoned the conventional blank-verse

delivery. He has endeavoured (not always with success) to make his actors bring out the meaning of their sentences, to make them speak in voices approximately human, and at a pace rapid enough to hold the interest of the audience. As an example of the difficulty which even the most intelligent

producer hae in uprooting the old vices, we may mention the lad delivery of one of the Lords of Sicilia, and particularly his habit of pronouncing suck words as " negligence " and "instrument" with a stress upon the last syllable which belongs, it is to be hoped, entirely to the stage. But in his efforts at looking after the sense Mr. Barker has unfortunately forgotten to look after the sound ; and the result has been the evaporation of much of the poetry of the play. In an. inter- view in a daily paper he is repeated to have said that "this isn't a blank-verse play," and his actors speak it accordingly— as prose. In the earlier acts the fatal result of this mistake was less apparent. The violence of the morbid invective of Leontes— .

"Is whispering nothing ? Is leaning cheek to cheek ?is meeting noses ?'

—carries itself through by its rhetoric even without its poetry. But in the fourth act there is scarcely anything but poetry, and poetry greater perhaps than Shakespeare ever wrote else- where. The heartrending effect of Mr. Barker's neglect of rhythm was the disappearance of almost every trace of this magic.

"When you do dance, I wish you A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do Nothine lint that; move etre, lain so, • And own no other function."

It might almost have been a piece of dialogue between two "lyrics" in a musical comedy.

There remains to be considered the decorative side of the production ; and again. Mr Barker has made a noble attempt

to escape from the traditional ugliness. He has had the assietance. of- two clever artists—of Mr. Norman Wilkinson for the snonory and of Mr. Albert Rothenstein for the dresses.

Neither of these gentlemen can be accused of clinging to Royal Academy standards ; they have cheerfully thrown over realism-and history, .and have abandoned themselves to

a serious effort at catching and expressing and developing the spirit ef_ The Winter's- Tale. The fact of their failure is one of the strongest proofs that has been -seen of the truth of

Mr. Gordon Craig's fundamental axiom. In. the ideal pro- duetion the author, producer, scene-painter, costume-designer, and even actor will be the same man; and. in proportion as these offices afedifferentiated and occupied by different men, the production will suffer. It is perhaps too late to ask Mr.

Barker to learn to paint his own scenery. But why should

not a single artist have designed both clothes and scenery? Mr. Rothenstein has had experience with scenery, as we know from the Cambridge production of Cbmus four years ago. Mr. Wilkinson designed the costumes for- Iphigenia in Tauris

at the Kingeway. It is difficult even to imagine Mr. Barker's aim in splitting up his fortes. But by doing so he bas gone far to spoil the decoration of the piece. For each of the

artists has a marked. and. each has found a

definite and, by itself; interesting atmosphere in Shakespeare's play. Mr. Wilkinson feels it as something cool and stately, with a. touch of savagery on one side and of rusticity on the other. 'Mr. Rothenstein also sees savagery in it-and rusticity;

but his savagery is quite baroque and fantastic,- and his rusticity belongs almost to a bal marque. The combination of two- stioh contradictory points of view worries the spectator without affecting him-; and when to these la added the imprespion of a. third. and no leis marked personality

—that of the producer; Mr. Barker .himself—the exasperation.

is only intensified. Is it too much to hope that in his future Shakespearean productions, as to which rumours are abroad, Mr. Barker will give serious consideration to this point ?

But when every detraction has been made, Mr. Barker's attempt can fairly be described as the most interesting Shakespearean revival that has been seen in London within the memory of this generation. He has shown that an Eliza- bethan play can be acted without cuts in three hours ; he has brought into prominence some interesting technical improve- ments in lighting and other stage mechanism; but, most of all, be has given a real stimulus to those who are hoping for a revival of serious play-production in England. B.