That is to say, with Any One of
our Sixteen Greatest Actors
It was within the privacy of his own library that we obtained--need we
say with infinite difficulty--our interview with the Great Actor. He was
sitting in a deep arm-chair, so buried in his own thoughts that he
was oblivious of our approach. On his knee before him lay a cabinet
photograph of himself. His eyes seemed to be peering into it, as if
seeking to fathom its unfathomable mystery. We had time to note that a
beautiful carbon photogravure of himself stood on a table at his elbow,
while a magnificent half-tone pastel of himself was suspended on a
string from the ceiling. It was only when we had seated ourself in a
chair and taken out our notebook that the Great Actor looked up.
“An interview?” he said, and we noted with pain the weariness in his
tone. “Another interview!”
We bowed.
“Publicity!” he murmured rather to himself than to us. “Publicity! Why
must one always be forced into publicity?”
It was not our intention, we explained apologetically, to publish or to
print a single word--
“Eh, what?” exclaimed the Great Actor. “Not print it? Not publish it?
Then what in--”
Not, we explained, without his consent.
“Ah,” he murmured wearily, “my consent. Yes, yes, I must give it. The
world demands it. Print, publish anything you like. I am indifferent to
praise, careless of fame. Posterity will judge me. But,” he added more
briskly, “let me see a proof of it in time to make any changes I might
care to.”
We bowed our assent.
“And now,” we began, “may we be permitted to ask a few questions about
your art? And first, in which branch of the drama do you consider that
your genius chiefly lies, in tragedy or in comedy?”
“In both,” said the Great Actor.
“You excel then,” we continued, “in neither the one nor the other?”
“Not at all,” he answered, “I excel in each of them.”
“Excuse us,” we said, “we haven’t made our meaning quite clear. What we
meant to say is, stated very simply, that you do not consider yourself
better in either of them than in the other?”
“Not at all,” said the Actor, as he put out his arm with that splendid
gesture that we have known and admired for years, at the same time
throwing back his leonine head so that his leonine hair fell back from
his leonine forehead. “Not at all. I do better in both of them. My
genius demands both tragedy and comedy at the same time.”
“Ah,” we said, as a light broke in upon us, “then that, we presume, is
the reason why you are about to appear in Shakespeare?”
The Great Actor frowned.
“I would rather put it,” he said, “that Shakespeare is about to appear
in me.”
“Of course, of course,” we murmured, ashamed of our own stupidity.
“I appear,” went on the Great Actor, “in _Hamlet_. I expect to present,
I may say, an entirely new Hamlet.”
“A new Hamlet!” we exclaimed, fascinated. “A new Hamlet! Is such a thing
possible?”
“Entirely,” said the Great Actor, throwing his leonine head forward
again. “I have devoted years of study to the part. The whole conception
of the part of Hamlet has been wrong.”
We sat stunned.
“All actors hitherto,” continued the Great Actor, “or rather, I should
say, all so-called actors--I mean all those who tried to act before
me--have been entirely mistaken in their presentation. They have
presented Hamlet as dressed in black velvet.”
“Yes, yes,” we interjected, “in black velvet, yes!”
“Very good. The thing is absurd,” continued the Great Actor, as he
reached down two or three heavy volumes from the shelf beside him. “Have
you ever studied the Elizabethan era?”
“The which?” we asked modestly.
“The Elizabethan era?”
We were silent.
“Or the pre-Shakespearean tragedy?”
We hung our head.
“If you had, you would know that a Hamlet in black velvet is perfectly
ridiculous. In Shakespeare’s day--as I could prove in a moment if you
had the intelligence to understand it--there was no such thing as black
velvet. It didn’t exist.”
“And how then,” we asked, intrigued, puzzled and yet delighted, “do
_you_ present Hamlet?”
“In _brown_ velvet,” said the Great Actor.
“Great Heavens,” we exclaimed, “this is a revolution.”
“It is. But that is only one part of my conception. The main thing will
be my presentation of what I may call the psychology of Hamlet.”
“The psychology!” we said.
“Yes,” resumed the Great Actor, “the psychology. To make Hamlet
understood, I want to show him as a man bowed down by a great burden. He
is overwhelmed with Weltschmerz. He carries in him the whole weight of
the Zeitgeist; in fact, everlasting negation lies on him--”
“You mean,” we said, trying to speak as cheerfully as we could, “that
things are a little bit too much for him.”
“His will,” went on the Great Actor, disregarding our interruption, “is
paralysed. He seeks to move in one direction and is hurled in another.
One moment he sinks into the abyss. The next, he rises above the clouds.
His feet seek the ground, but find only the air--”
“Wonderful,” we said, “but will you not need a good deal of machinery?”
“Machinery!” exclaimed the Great Actor, with a leonine laugh. “The
machinery of _thought_, the mechanism of power, of magnetism--”
“Ah,” we said, “electricity.”
“Not at all,” said the Great Actor. “You fail to understand. It is all
done by my rendering. Take, for example, the famous soliloquy on death.
You know it?”
“‘To be or not to be,’” we began.
“Stop,” said the Great Actor. “Now observe. It is a soliloquy.
Precisely. That is the key to it. It is something that Hamlet _says to
himself_. Not a _word of it_, in my interpretation, is actually spoken.
All is done in absolute, unbroken silence.”
“How on earth,” we began, “can you do that?”
“Entirely and solely _with my face_.”
Good heavens! Was it possible? We looked again, this time very closely,
at the Great Actor’s face. We realized with a thrill that it might be
done.
“I come before the audience _so_,” he went on, “and
soliloquize--thus--follow my face, please--”
As the Great Actor spoke, he threw himself into a characteristic pose
with folded arms, while gust after gust of emotion, of expression, of
alternate hope, doubt and despair, swept--we might say chased themselves
across his features.
“Wonderful!” we gasped.
“Shakespeare’s lines,” said the Great Actor, as his face subsided to its
habitual calm, “are not necessary; not, at least, with my acting. The
lines, indeed, are mere stage directions, nothing more. I leave them
out. This happens again and again in the play. Take, for instance, the
familiar scene where Hamlet holds the skull in his hand: Shakespeare
here suggests the words ‘Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him well--’”
“Yes, yes!” we interrupted, in spite of ourself, “‘a fellow of infinite
jest--’”
“Your intonation is awful,” said the Actor. “But listen. In my
interpretation I use no words at all. I merely carry the skull quietly
in my hand, very slowly, across the stage. There I lean against a pillar
at the side, with the skull in the palm of my hand, and look at it in
silence.”
“Wonderful!” we said.
“I then cross over to the right of the stage, very impressively, and
seat myself on a plain wooden bench, and remain for some time, looking
at the skull.”
“Marvellous!”
“I then pass to the back of the stage and lie down on my stomach, still
holding the skull before my eyes. After holding this posture for some
time, I crawl slowly forward, portraying by the movement of my legs and
stomach the whole sad history of Yorick. Finally I turn my back on the
audience, still holding the skull, and convey through the spasmodic
movements of my back Hamlet’s passionate grief at the loss of his
friend.”
“Why!” we exclaimed, beside ourself with excitement, “this is not merely
a revolution, it is a revelation.”
“Call it both,” said the Great Actor.
“The meaning of it is,” we went on, “that you practically don’t need
Shakespeare at all.”
“Exactly, I do not. I could do better without him. Shakespeare cramps
me. What I really mean to convey is not Shakespeare, but something
greater, larger--how shall I express it--bigger.” The Great Actor paused
and we waited, our pencil poised in the air. Then he murmured, as his
eyes lifted in an expression of something like rapture. “In fact--ME.”
He remained thus, motionless, without moving. We slipped gently to our
hands and knees and crawled quietly to the door, and so down the stairs,
our notebook in our teeth.