On the other hand, of course, the scenic accompaniment of a poetic play,
whether tragic or romantic or comic, must never be so scant or so barren
as to disappoint the spectators. The stage-accessories must be adequate
and yet subordinate; they ought to resemble the clothes of a truly
well-dressed woman, in that they never call attention to themselves
altho they can withstand and even reward intimate inspection. This
delicate ideal of artistic stage-setting, esthetically satisfying, and
yet never flamboyant, was completely attained in the production of
'Sister Beatrice,' at the New Theater, due to the skill and taste of Mr.
Hamilton Bell. The several manifestations of the supernatural might
easily have been over-emphasized; but a fine restraint resulted in a
unity of tone and of atmosphere, so subtly achieved that the average
spectator carried away the memory of more than one lovely picture
without having let his thoughts wander away to consider by what means he
had been made to feel the presence of a miracle.
The special merit of this production of 'Sister Beatrice' lay in the
delicate art by which more was suggested than could well be shown. In
the theater, more often than not, the half is greater than the whole,
and what is unseen is frequently more powerful than what is made
visible. In Mr. Belasco's 'Darling of the Gods,' a singularly beautiful
spectacle, touched at times with a pathetic poetry, the defeated
samurais are at last reduced to commit hara-kiri. But we were not made
spectators of these several self-murders; we were permitted to behold
only the dim cane-brake into which these brave men had withdrawn, and to
overhear each of them call out his farewell greetings to his friends
before he dealt himself the deadly thrust. If we had been made witnesses
of this accumulated self-slaughter we might have been revolted by the
brutality of it. Transmitted to us out of a vague distance by a few
scattered cries, it moved us like the inevitable close of a truly tragic
tale.
In the 'Aiglon' of M. Rostand, Napoleon's feeble son finds himself alone
with an old soldier of his father's on the battle-field of Wagram; and
in the darkness of the night, and in the turmoil of a wind-storm the
hysteric lad almost persuades himself that he is actually present at the
famous fight, that he can hear the shrieks of the wounded, and the
groans of the dying, and that he can see the hands and arms of the dead
stretched up from the ground. This is all in the sickly boy's fancy, of
course, and yet in Paris the author had voices heard, and caused hands
and arms to be extended upward from the edge of the back drop, thus
vulgarizing his own imaginative episode by the presentation of a
concrete reality. Not quite so inartistic as this, and yet frankly
freakish was the arrangement of the closet scene between Hamlet and his
mother, when Sarah-Bernhardt made her misguided effort to impersonate
the Prince of Denmark. On the walls of the room where Hamlet talks
daggers to the queen there were full-length, life-sized portraits of her
two successive husbands, and when Hamlet bids her look on this picture,
and on this, the portrait of Hamlet's father became transparent, and in
its frame the spectators suddenly perceived the ghost. This is an
admirable example of misplaced cleverness, of the search for novelty for
its own sake, of the sacrifice of the totality of impression to a mere
trick.
'Hamlet' is the most poetic of plays, and the 'Aiglon' does its best to
be poetic, and therefore the less overt spectacle there may be in the
performance of these dramas the easier it will be for the spectator to
focus his attention on the poetry itself. Even more pretentiously poetic
than the 'Aiglon' is 'Chantecler,' upon which the ambitious author has
also lavished a great variety of stage-effects--as tho he were not quite
willing to rely for success upon his lyrical exuberance. In M. Rostand's
'Aiglon' and 'Chantecler,' as in Sarah-Bernhardt's 'Hamlet,' there was
to be observed a frequent confusion of the merely theatric with the
purely dramatic--a confusion to be found forty years ago in Fechter's
'Hamlet.' That picturesque French actor made over the English tragedy
into a French romantic melodrama; he kept the naked plot, and he cut out
all the poetry. He lowered Shakspere's play to the level of the other
melodramas in which he had won success--for instance, 'No Thorofare,'
due to the collaboration of Dickens and Wilkie Collins, or the earlier
'Fils de la Nuit,' acted in Paris long before Fechter appeared on the
English-speaking stage.
The 'Son of the Night' was a pirate bold, personated, of course, by
Fechter, and in one act his long, low, rakish craft with its black flag
flying, skimmed across the stage, cutting the waves, and dropping anchor
close to the footlights. The surface of the sea was represented by a
huge cloth, and the incessant motion of the waves was due to the
concealed activities of a dozen boys. The play had so long a run that
the sea-cloth was worn dangerously thin. At last at one performance, a
rent spread suddenly and disclosed a disgusted boy, just as the pirate
ship with the Son of the Night on its deck was preparing to come about.
Fechter was equal to the emergency. "Man overboard!" he cried, and,
leaning over the bow of the boat, he grabbed the boy by the collar and
pulled him on deck. Probably very few of the spectators noticed the
mishap, and if they had all observed it, what matter? A laugh or two,
more or less, during the performance of a prosaic melodrama, is of
little or no consequence. A disconcerting accident like this in a play
like the 'Son of the Night' does not cut any vital current of sympathy,
for this is a quality to which the piece could make no claim. But in a
truly poetic play a mishap of this sort would be a misfortune in that it
might precipitate the interest and interrupt the harmony of attention
demanded by the imaginative drama itself.
(1912.)