VENICE PRESERVED
Drury-Lane Theatre.
Drury-Lane Theatre.
Drury-Lane Theatre.
Drury-Lane Theatre.
Otway’s noble tragedy ofVenice Preservedwas produced here last night. The effect upon the whole was not satisfactory. The novelties of the representation were Mr. H. Johnstone asPierre, and Miss Campbell (from the Dublin Theatre) asBelvidera. Of Mr. Johnstone’sPierre, after having seen Mr. Kemble in it, or even Mr. Young, we cannot speak in terms of applause. The character is not one of blunt energy, but of deep art. It is more sarcastic than fierce, and even the fierceness is more calculated to wound others than to shake or disturb himself.He is a master-mind, that plays with the foibles and passions of others and wields their energies to his dangerous purposes with conscious careless indifference. Mr. Johnstone was boisterous in his declamation, coarse in his irony, pompous and common-place in his action. Mr. Rae (asJaffier), in the famous scene between these two characters, displayed some strong touches of nature and pathos. Miss Campbell, asBelvidera, did not altogether realize our idea of Otway’s heroine; one of ‘the most replenished sweet works of art or nature.’ Her face, though not handsome, is not without expression; but its character is strength, rather than softness. In her person she is graceful, and has a mixture of dignity and ease in her general deportment. Her voice is powerful, but in its higher tones it rises too much into a scream, and in its gentler ones subsides into a lisp, which is more infantine than feminine. In her general style of acting she put us sometimes in mind of Mrs Fawcit, sometimes of Miss Somerville, and more than once of Miss O’Neill. Her delineation of the part, if not sufficiently tender or delicate, was however forcible, impassioned, and affecting. We thought the last scene, in which she goes mad, and digs for her murdered husband in the grave, the best. We should indeed give her the preference over Miss O’Neill in this very trying scene. Her expression of the disordered wanderings of the imagination, and of the last desperate struggles of passion in her bosom, both by the intonations of her voice, and the varying actions of her body, were more natural, and less repulsive than the mere physical violence of Miss O’Neill in the same passage. The play was given out for repetition with some marks of disapprobation from a part of the audience.