"KING RICHARD III." AT DRURY LANE.

T'performance of Richard III. is too severe an ordeal to be faced by any actor of our time. In none of the familiar records of the dramatic successes of the past do we so clearly perceive the contrast between-the taste of that past and of the present, as in the accounts of the enthusiasm created by Garrick and Kean in this difficult and repulsive character. The tragedy, whether it be acted as Shakespeare wrote it or as Colley Cibber tinkered it, is so unmanageable as a play, so hurried, patchy, abrupt, intricate, and, for all its great passages and stirring in- cidents, so far removed from our sympathies, that it simply resolves itself into the representation of one character, and the parade of an extraordinary quantity of scenery and properties. Whether Shakespeare's Richard be a faithful reproduction of the tradition concerning the wicked Duke three centuries closer to the time he lived in, than ours, or whether he be a violent exaggeration of that tradition, he is an impossible being,—a monster such as the world never saw, or at least never saw capable of winning friends and adherents, of alluring women, and attracting the crowd. His hypocrisy is so rude a mockery, that it does not ever so slightly veil his brutality, and when the whole episode of the betrayal and murder of Clarence is left out of the play, every touch of finesse is lost, and Richard is like a criminal lunatic at large among a crowd of idiots, or a butcher with a strong taste for his business among a flock of sheep. The number of deaths and murders in the play, even before Cibber's arrangement of it included the murder of Henry VI. by Gloucester, brings it dangerously near to the boundary of burlesque ; and the King's sanguinary commands—the like of which Mr. Tennyson puts into Queen Mary's month with even more perilous iteration—can hardly be read with the sober serious- ness which they demand. Again, the famous scene with the Lady Anne, which only the audacious genius of Shakespeare could have conceived, not even an actor of audacious genius could render credible or tolerable, at least to our mind, and we have never been able to persuade ourselves that it can have been so, even when Garrick was Gloucester, and Mrs. Siddons was the Lady Anne ; or that, fine as it is when read, the cynical devilry with which Richard repeats in the case of Queen Elizabeth, on behalf of her daughter, the cajoleries which had succeeded with Anne on behalf of herself, can ever, when acted, have altogether escaped the ridiculous.

The .performance of Ring Richard the Third by Mr. Barry Sullivan has not altered our belief that the character is an un- grateful one, and its representation too arduous and exacting a task. The actor plays the part (in the Cibber version) meri- toriously in many respects, laboriously in all ; but comes danger- ously near burlesque so often, that one has a breathless sense of relief several times during the play, from the cringe of appre- hension that people must laugh in another moment. The melan- choly fact that Mr. Barry Sullivan is supported as ill as one can conceive it possible that he could be supported, does not count for so mach in the general effect as so disastrous a state of things would count for in any other play. Soliloquy is frequent and im- portant in Richard the Third, and all the other people are so insignificant beside the " Crookback," that they can hardly help to make, and cannot seriously mar, the chief actor's success. One pities Mr. Barry Sullivan for such a Catesby, and such a "deep-revolving, witty Buckingham "—both convey the notion of timid keepers dodging a dangerous lunatic whom they dare not seize—and still more for a Lady Anne who talks like a dull schoolgirl blundering over a " piece " on a breaking-up day, simpers impartially at every kind of sentiment and situation, receives the first horrible intimation of Richard's meaning towards her without a start, and with gaze uplifted to the gallery wears, as Queen, a gown of a colour which did not exist at the date of the play, cannot manage her royal mantle, and parts with Queen Elizabeth, when she is summoned away to be crowned, with all the expression which could be expected at the termination of a morning call. But if everything were to cohere, Mr. Barry Sul- livan's Richard would still fail to satisfy and convince. We can- not affirm that it is not Shakespearean in its interpretation. Just such an illimitable villain is Shakespeare's Gloucester, but surely not so villainous of tone, so ferocious in manner, so grossly brutal, that Hastings' description becomes evident irony. That Richard should stamp and rave, should strut and scowl, should make horrible faces, and wear a confirmed frown of deeply furrowed blackness, in the presence of people whom he first frightens and afterwards kills, is admissible ; but no tradition of the Richards of the past can reconcile us to the same sort of thing in the soliloquies, where the counter-acting sense of relief ought to be conveyed, and the villain who in real life was always acting, either to those whom he wanted to deceive, or to those whom he wanted to terrify, could contemplate his real self, and exult in the success or review the progress of his designs. Mr. Barry Sullivan has, no doubt, tradition on his side when he makes Richard stamp, and rave, and fall about like an epileptic in front of his tent—the sentinels having judiciously withdrawn that he may do so—in the interpolated soliloquy which, spoken by the King while pacing up and down, with folded arms and bended head, would have naturalness to recommend it, and would throw into bolder relief the agony and passion of the final scenes. But the absence of gradation, and of light and shade, the forcing of the note all through, so deaden the effect at this point, that it is difficult to appreciate the real merit of the burst of warlike ardour, pride, fury, and exultant courage which inspires the lines :—

" A. thousand hearts are great within my bosom," Ike.,

—and contrasts finely with the somewhat low and abusive strain of Richard's oration to his army in disparagement of the enemy. All the resources of the actor have been so heavily taxed pre- viously, that there is nothing novel in the ecstacy of passion with which he rushes off the stage, to rush on again, and utter the last and only grand words which Shakespeare lends "the bloody dog," and which have in them the only explanation of Richard's popularity.

Mr. Barry Sullivan's Richard is monotonously consistent and continuously broad. His moral deformity is no more tem- pered by any momentary amenity than the physical ugliness on which he comments so bitterly is ever forgotten, or overborne by any other attribute. The actor has adopted the extreme, which is undoubtedly the Shakespearean version of this ugliness ; his " make-up " is a marvel of repulsiveness, and his countenance is fierce and cruel enough for the typical murderer, usurper, and fratricide. Occasionally he produces fine effects of expression; as, for instance, when his saturnine contempt for Edward's widow, whom he believes he has talked over to his purpose, breaks out in the words :—

" Relenting fool, and shallow, changing woman!"

—and when Norfolk hands him the paper he has found in his tent on the morning of the battle of Bosworth. There is no better bit of acting in the play than Richard's reading of the words :—

a Jockey of Norfolk, be not too bold,

For Dickon, thy master, is bought and sold,"

—with a quick, covert glance of suspicion and fear, an instan- taneous recovery, an admirably careless utterance of, "A thing devised by the enemy," a prompt resumption of the orders he is giving,--

"Go, gentlemen, every man unto his charge ;"

and then the sudden, irresistible recurrence to the terror and agony of the dream-laden night, in the needless counsel to men who had not been dreaming:—

" Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls ; Conscience is but a word that cowards use, Devised at first to keep the strong in awe: Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law."

Again, in emphasising the self-contempt and yet rebellious despair with which Richard regards his own deformity, the actor makes efficient use of both countenance and voice. Worthy of all the malignant hearts that ever delivered their bitterness in words half-furious and half-mocking is Richard's utterance of :—

"Why I, in this weak piping time of peace, Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to spy my shadow in the sun, And descant on mine own deformity."

And completely admirable is his recurrence to the jibe, when having "proved" himself "a lover," he bursts into the wonder- ful medley of mockery and exultation which embodies his soom

for Anne and his triumph over not her only, but his dead rival also ; and ends with,—

" Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass, That I may see my shadow as I pass,"

—and goes off with a mocking salutation to the supposed shadow, and a caper of the limping limb perfectly impish. If only the preceding scene had in it the delicacy and the strength of these effects, the performance might claim much warmer praise than can be accorded to it. But Mr. Barry Sullivan is unable to con- quer the immense difficulty with which Shakespeare has beset the path of any actor of this part. His face does not relax from its cruel and crafty villainy ; his tongue does not " glose ;" neither

penitence, persuasion, nor the lordly lawlessness of an absorbing passion—such as Shakespeare certainly meant Richard to assume—

inspires his cajoleries of the wretched Anne ; and his gestures are remarkably ill-selected for those of a wooer. The face, the voice, and the gestures are full of coarse and undisguised mockery ; the wooer might be Quasimodo orQuilp, for distortion and repulsive- ness; but he is not Shakespeare's Richard, who, though his method is equally impossible, did not woo and win the new-made widow by overt sneers. The whole scene verges dangerously on the ridiculous, which it attains when the Lady Anne goes simper- ing out to await the tryst at Crosby House, utterly oblivious of King Henry's corpse.

The piece is handsomely mounted, and several of the scenes are really beautiful ; but we must protest against such an anomaly as

the appearance of Queen Elizabeth as Edward's widow in a modern gown, with head-gear apparently constructed of the front of a cheap mourning bonnet ornamented with beads, and

with a black wisp hanging behind, to do duty for the weeds of a queen in the time of the last Plantagenet. The widowed queen and bereaved mother is very inadequately represented, but beside the stupendous inanity of the lady who acts the part of Anne, Mrs. Vezin's performance approaches to being tolerable. The little brother and sister, Master and Miss Grattan, who de- lighted all London as the child-lovers in Rip Van Winkle, are the young princes in Richard Ill., and to their performance nothing but praise is to be accorded. They never miss a point, they never cease to act ; they can listen, they talk together with their eyes, while the elders discourse ; they perfectly embody Shakespeare's differentiation of the princes' characters. The simple, easy dignity of the little King, as he receives the address from the Lord Mayor, is delightful ; the archness of the Duke of York, and his sudden childish fright at his uncle, and the rallying courage with which he crosses the stage and pulls Richard's sleeve, his keen appreciation of the biting jest about the ape and the shoulder, whichthe pert boy repeats only too faithfully, are admir- able. In the Tower scene these children act beautifully ; the young King's weariness is most touching, and York's "I am afraid to stay here" makes one start with the horrid sense of a child's real dread. Their acting in this scene half redeems the impertinence of its meddling with Shakespeare's text. There ought to be a successful future before these clever little actors.