The Elizabethan Stage Society's performance of "Everyman" deserves a
place of its own among the stage performances of our time. "Everyman"
took one into a kind of very human church, a church in the midst of the
market-place, like those churches in Italy, in which people seem so much
at home. The verse is quaint, homely, not so archaic when it is spoken
as one might suppose in reading it; the metre is regular in heat, but
very irregular in the number of syllables, and the people who spoke it
so admirably under Mr. Poel's careful training had not been trained to
scan it as well as they articulated it. "Everyman" is a kind of
"Pilgrim's Progress," conceived with a daring and reverent imagination,
so that God himself comes quite naturally upon the stage, and speaks out
of a clothed and painted image. Death, lean and bare-boned, rattles his
drum and trips fantastically across the stage of the earth, leading his
dance; Everyman is seen on his way to the grave, taking leave of Riches,
Fellowship, Kindred, and Goods (each personified with his attributes),
escorted a little way by Strength, Discretion, Beauty, and the Five
Wits, and then abandoned by them, and then going down into the grave
with no other attendance than that of Knowledge and Good Deeds. The
pathos and sincerity of the little drama were shown finely and
adequately by the simple cloths and bare boards of a Shakespearean
stage, and by the solemn chanting of the actors and their serious,
unspoilt simplicity in acting. Miss Wynne-Matthison in the part of
Everyman acted with remarkable power and subtlety; she had the complete
command of her voice, as so few actors or actresses have, and she was
able to give vocal expression to every shade of meaning which she had
apprehended.