The Theatre
(Blackstone Theatre)
Oneof the noblest things I have ever seen on the stage—or ever expect to see—is the Hamlet of Forbes-Robertson. The poet, the scholar, the philosopher, the great gentleman, the lover, the brilliant talker, the anguished boy—they are all there in the tall man in black with the graven face and the wonderful hands and the voice of surpassing richnesses—the tall, graceful, impetuous, humorous, agonized man in black who reads Shakespeare as if he were improvising and makes a true and charming human being out of a character that has had the misfortune to become a problem. “And please observe,” writes Bernard Shaw, “that this is not a cold Hamlet. He is none of your logicians who reason their way through the world because they cannot feel their way through it; his intellect is the organ of his passion; his eternal self-criticism is as alive and thrilling as it can possibly be.” His moment of expiation, alone at the back of the stage, with his arms raised to the vaulted heavens; and his gallant last moment on the throne with its single silver sentence, “The rest is silence”—these things are too moving to be articulate about. Richard Le Gallienne has expressed it all as well as it can be done: “All my life I seem to have been asking my friends, those I loved best, those who valued the dearest, the kindest, the greatest, and the strongest, in our strange human life, to come with me and see Forbes-Robertson die inHamlet. I asked them because, as that strange young dead king sat upon his throne, there was something, whatever it meant—death, life, immortality, what you will—of a surpassing loneliness, something transfiguring the poor passing moment of trivial, brutal murder into a beauty to which it was quite natural that that stern Northern warrior, with his winged helmet, should bend the knee. I would not exchange anything I have ever read or seen for Forbes-Robertson as he sits there so still and starlit upon the throne of Denmark.”
M. C. A.
(Powers’ Theatre)
A bleeding chunk of reality is not art, but it is a bleeding chunk of reality; your aesthetic emotions may sleep at the sight of a tortured animal, but your humane emotions will roll up to your throat when you witness the simple tragedy of a Jewish girl in St. Petersburg, presented in Michael Morton’s play,The Yellow Ticket. To me such a realistic play in such a realisticpresentation has as little to do with dramatic art as a reporter’s story has to do with literature; but I brushed aside my memories of Rheinhardt and Komissarzhevskaya when I went to see a piece of Russian life at Powers’. And I saw it indeed—real, nude, appalling.
Some of my acquaintances have asked me whether the tragedy could be true, whether a Jewish girl has no right to live in St. Petersburg, unless she has bought her protection from the police by selling her reputation—that is by procuring a yellow ticket, the trade-licence of a prostitute. Yes, it is true. A Jew is forbidden to abide outside the Pale of Settlement, with the exception of certain merchants and persons of a university education, and prostitutes. The latter form the most desirable element in the eyes of government officials, since their occupation does not generally presuppose any predilections for revolutionary ideas or free thought. I have known instances where women involved in the Revolution, gentiles as well as Jewesses, obtained yellow tickets which served them the rôle of acarte blanchefrom the molestations of the police. There are many anecdotic facts in Russian life that seem incredible to the outsider, and Mr. Morton has produced in his play a mass of such facts with photographic verisimilitude. It must be said to the credit of the actors that they have escaped the slippery path of melodramatic overdoing.
K.
(The Little Theatre)
“Hosanna!” I felt like shouting, when the curtains slowly concealed the mysterious stage. I am still under the spell of the oriental atmosphere, not yet cooled off for objective criticism. What Florence Kiper Frank has done with the biblical subject may terrify the orthodox student of the Bible, but I greeted her daring heresy and free manipulation of epochs and styles. She has skilfully blended the bloodthirsty, gloating outcries of Deborah’s Song with the idyllic lyrics of Solomon’s Songs, and has presented inJaela composite type, a mixture of the savage tent-woman, of the passionate yet gentle Shulamite, and of the eternal jealous female. The result, as far as the creation of an atmosphere goes, is a positive success.
A word about the staging. Maurice Browne, on the privilege of a pioneer, may be congratulated on the progress he has made in leaving behind mouldy conventions and approaching the state where he can produce pure aesthetic emotions. The three one-act plays on the present bill, regardless of their merits or demerits, demonstrate the great possibilities of an artistic stage manager, who can do away with elaborate accessories and produce suggestive illusions with the aid of an ultramarine background and calico apple blossoms. Yet, as in all pioneering, there are signs of hesitation and of half-measures. I am sure that the effect ofJaelwould not in the leastdiminish (it would rather be intensified), if we were spared the inevitable storm-pyrotechnics. The verses in themselves imply the idea of battle and tempest, and Miss Kiper in the title rôle has the voice and diction to serve the purpose.
K.