"THE TWO ORPHANS."
TES Deux Orphelines" is a coarse drama, admirably con-
A 1 structed. The dialogue is poor, the sentiment is clap- trap, the situations are effective, the characters are types, not .persons, the mechanical effects are very striking, and the actors who sustained the principal parts at the Porte St. Martin Theatre played them well, with no more exaggeration than their unnaturalness demanded, and with technical fidelity to their pre - revolutionary period. The play was unpleasant and tedious, but perfectly mounted, and it was interesting to see last spring, when the Paris audience. discerned deep
political significance in the trite incidents of the wicked noble- man's career and the virtuous workman's woes. The Due de Broglie had just come to grief ; the successive " Gouveme- meats de trois-quarts d'heurs" were supplying Paris with butts for its bon mots. The Porte St. Martin audience—in the rebuilt theatre, a significant reminder of the fraternal days of '71 —rejoiced over Messieurs Dennery and Cormon as over a twin transmigration of Beaumarchais, and applauded the noble saying of the Chevalier de Vaudry—who is not too strictly virtuous at first, but is converted to the most elevated principles by his love for a daughter of the people—that the "reign of Kings was coming to an end, and the reign of the people about to begin." The play was not funny, but the audience was. No doubt the audience at the Theatre du Chatelet, which also has plenty of souvenirs, bloody and brotherly, of '71, is equally appreciative, and the drama is enjoying a second run.'
But what, in the name of all that is incongruous, brings "The Two Orphans" to the Olympic Theatre in London ? The stage is not large enough to admit of the production of the scenic effects which, to a cultivated audience such as the Olympic boasts, con- stitute the sole attraction of the piece in the original ; the epoch, the manners, and the minutire are precisely those which never are correctly rendered by English actors, or adequately studied by English stage-managers ; and the performance all through verges so dangerously on the ridiculous, that the least slip would cer- tainly form the one decisive step, if a play in which Mr. Henry Neville assumes the part of a needy knife-grinder with a lame leg, who is terribly afraid of a big brother, were not so complete a joke in itself, that the odd bits of absurdity do not count. The tawdry sentiment of the original, uttered in bald language, is not objectionable in itself, but it is singularly uninteresting. The angelic orphans who rescue a fallen woman from suicide by telling her that repentance will win pardon from Heaven, and honest industry rehabilitate her in this world—remarkable truths which she has apparently never heard before,—the communicative orphans who select the moment of their arrival in Paris, alone and unknown, to confide to one another in an open market-place the history of their past lives,—the whole gist of the narrative being their inseparability, and the utter dependence of the blind Louise upon Henriette,—are intended to be excessively pathetic. But they don't get a tear out of the Olympic audience, though they made their compatriots of the Porte St. Martin weep. When Ilenriette was carried off by a wicked Marquis, and blind Louise was all but ran over by the carriage of a presumably wicked Marquise, it was admirably done, the carriage was real, and the horse played his part so well, that many shoulders went up in a shuddery shrug ; but the villainous lackey of the Olympic does his abducting with neat alacrity, and Mr. Neville has suppressed the real carriage and the live horse. They are indeed at present employed by the "soiled dove" from the mining country, who is "Lost in London" at the Princess's, and we willingly dispense with them at the Olympic, though we lose the shudder and the shrug. No treatment could make such a drama as "Lea Deux Orphelines" acceptable to us on its own merits, for it appeals to a low standard of taste by tawdry means ; its lights are all glare, its shadows are all pitch, its vulgarity is essential ; but it would be very unjust to take the clumsy travesty of their drama at the Olympic Theatre for a faithful presentment of the joint work of Messrs. Dennery and Cormon.
A French play must be put on an English stage either as a translation or as an adaptation. With the latter treatment we have an extensive and melancholy acquaintance. It usually means a performance which puzzles those spectators who have not seen the original, but who struggle with a sense of incongruity throughout ; and it enrages those who have, and can perceive how it has been maimed and perverted. In the case of "The Orphans," we were prepared for the former treatment. Everything was to be literal, everything exact ; indeed, the enthusiasm was extended to the programme, in which the third act is described as taking place in the " Eglise of Saint Martin," and the fifth in the "Bureau of the Count de Liniere." Pierre, the meek and needy knife-grinder, is " made-up " from the original with scrupulous exactitude—long hair, haggard face, bent knee, timid, deprecating expression, and convenient coat, which he puts round Louise in a snow-storm, during which other people converse leisurely in the open space before the church, and with which the most absurd piece of " business " perhaps ever seen on any stage is afterwards faithfully gone through. In the pavilion scene, at the château of the wicked Marquis, the imitation of the French original is as good as the limited stage space permits, and the scene in which the Countess de Liniere passes
the blind girl at the church-door is, on the -whole, well done, though while the men are dressed in costumes of the period, the minor women go to mass in modern attire, and substitute for the graceful capuchons of the Porte St. Martin the homely anachronism of the simple waterproof. Mr. Rignold, as the ribald villain Jacques, depends too much on his pipe for his effects, and gathers his humour on the banks, not of the Seine, but of the Thames. His chuckling, his rib-poking, his police-rattle throat utterances, his injunction to his mother not to "keep fidgittin' all over the place," are not a bit hie the Porte St. Martin ruffian ; and it would be better if he would call for "brandy," and not for " co-ni-ac I" - His " make-up " is in imitation of the original Jacques, but he does not wear the pic- turesque, street-brigand, impossible dress with the air of jaunty, lounging, utter blackguardism, and underlying fierceness of the Frenchman, and one really great effect which he might have successfully imitated, the death of Jacques at the hands of Pierre, which was wonderfully done at the Porte St. Martin, he is de- prived of by a mutilation of the piece, unjustifiable on any grounds of either art or common-sense.
We take it for granted that our readers are acquainted with the story of "Les Deux Orphelines," and consequently, with the motive of the piece, that which gives consistency to the various parts, and its interest, meagre at best, to the plot,— the fact that the blind Louise is the illegitimate daughter of the Countess de Liniere, whose husband is Minister of Police, and whose nephew is the Chevalier de Vaudry, the converted young noble who falls in love with Henriette after he has rescued her from the wicked Marquis, and devotes himself to aiding her search for the blind girl, her supposed sister, who has fallen into the clutches of La Frochard, and is dragged about Paris by her, singing and begging. From this motive the story is indisputably well evolved ; with this for its foundation, the plot is cleverly constructed, con- sistent though extravagant, without weakness, and without slur. But the version which is played in English at the Olympic changes the motive of the story, pulls the foundation from under the plot, and combines in many instances the crudeness and the stiffness of a literal translation with the feeble impertinence that so often characterises our "adaptations." We should like to know whether the joint authors of "Lea Deux Orphelines" understand English, and if so, what they think of "The Two Orphans." If they comprehend the travestie, they probably regard " ces Anglais " as more " origina.ux " than ever, and take a Frenchly philosophical view of our Philistinism. We are a moral people, and we like plays ; but we cannot write them, and on the whole we cannot act them. We have certain actors who can act certain " character " bits, here and there, and we get plays written with suitable bits for those actors; they act them, and then, hie Mr. Shirley Brooks's Japanese, we cry, "0 wonderful and beautiful " Or we take the works of our French neighbours—who also like plays, but who can write them and act them, and who will not have " bits ;" and if they make much of big stars, insist that the little ones shall at least twinkle— and we " adapt " them to our stage morality, after which process they are as much like the real thing as the lion stuffed with straw is like the live lion. It would be difficult to surpass the ingenious absurdity of the result which has been produced by the accommodation of "Les Deux Orphelines" to the con- ventional morality of the English Stage. We do not blame the manipulator, or the "management ;" the latter power has to provide for a Philistine audience, and he provides accordingly ; but we pity the residuum of, not Philistine, play-goers, who can get no tolerable native plays, and are not suffered to import their dramatic luxuries 'neat.' There is absolutely no sense at all left in quite half of this particular play, because, though we don't mind a duel with knives between brothers, we could not be sup- posed to tolerate a story of seduction in high-life, followed by the exposure of a baby—with two rouleaux of gold tucked up in her frock—on the steps of a church, and the subsequent marriage of the seduced young person (in high-life) to the Count de Liniere, her suspense concerning her child's fate, her divided mind between the belief that her husband's official position would enable him to ascertain for her the child's fate, and her terror of his detection of her sin and deceit. This is the true story of the play, and it imparts all its meaning to the Count de Liniere's search for the history of his wife's family among the archives, which have re- cently become accessible to him in his official position ; all its reason to the Countess's sympathy with the Chevalier de Vaudry ; all its point to their sentimental prosing. The morality of the English stage is supposed to be satisfactorily vindicated by turning the seduction of the young lady (in high-life) into a secret mar- riage with a peasant. A secret Marriage in any rank in life has always been next to impossible in France ; among the nobles, and before the Revolution, it was quite impossible. Let us see what morality gains by this bit of Bowdlerism. The young lady's parents having torn her lawful child from her, and exposed it on the steps of the church, as before mentioned, force her to contract, what they believe to be, an illegal marriage with a great nobleman, and they commit this positive and prospective crime in the name of outraged honour ! When everything is nicely put right in the end, and the Count de Liniere gallantly embraces his step- daughter, the blind Louise, he informs his wife that if she has been suffering from anydoubts about the legality of their marriage, he can satisfy them,—he has ascertained that her first husband, "De Brissac," died "in the Bastille" before her second marriage. So the climax of absurdity is capped by the 'peasant' being en- dowed with one of the noblest names in France, both past and present. A collateral result is that the Count de Liniere, one of the most effective persons in the original play, becomes a pur- poseless bore in the purified version, and the scene in which his wife's nephew tears the leaf containing her history out of the Archives is not only turned from its true signi- ficance, but the effect of the action is reversed,—it con- firms a suspicion which her husband's discovery of the truth (the first marriage) would have dispelled, and increases the mysterious misery of the Countess's life. Every point in the dialogues between the Count and Countess is destroyed by this absurd alteration, the concluding scene, which even in the original is tame, is turned into an anti-climax, and by placing Louise in the position of a legitimate descendant of a great French noble, it establishes a hopeless bather between her and Pierre, artless indeed she is supposed to imitate her mother. Not only has our conventional morality been so carefully attended to, that the sense of the plot is eliminated, but our liking for making things pleasant is consulted to the destruction of the best point in the original piece, which occurs in the scene in which Pierre kills Jacques, and the curtain falls on the one brother dead, and the other stricken with despair. Very properly, we never see more of either; in the original play the bay and the cripple are alike out of the way of the young lady who is about to find her mother and to recover her eyesight. But we are too tender- hearted here for such a conclusion as that, so Jacques is only badly wounded, and the two brothers are uncomfortably hinted at as being somewhere about in the last scene, though if Jacques be not converted by a sound stabbing to proper behaviour, and Pierre's knee be not put right by the incoherent doctor who turns up everywhere (and we hear nothing of such a consummation)„ we think the improver on the Porte St. Martin idea would have done better if he had allowed them to kill each other. It would have been much pleasanter for the Two Orphans, and all the same to the audience.
Some of the acting is good. Miss Fowler, as Louise, gets through her dreary part and her drearier songs very fairly, keep- ing her eyes fixed and vague almost always ; Miss Ernstone would play Henriette better if she did not affect a French accent in a (very) English version ; Mrs. Huntley is a good La Frochard, on the whole, but she occasionally remembers Erin and the days of old too fondly for a virago of the "Mysteries of Paris" order. Mr. Neville is so distressingly sentimental whenever he gets away from his wheel, that we dread his putting it aside to kneel and invoke Heaven, or to limp and whimper to his big brother. The blustering sentimentality of " Clancarty " became him ; but even his grindstone cannot do away with the absurdity of his whining sentimentality as Pierre.
The truth is, "The Two Orphans" is neither a translation nor an adaptation of "Les Deux Orphelines," but a clumsy medley, which offers a fine example of one of our prominent shams ; and which. places the authors of the original and the actors in the travesty at equal disadvantage.
Previous page
