When it was announced that Mrs. Tree was to give a translation of
"L'Enigme" of M. Paul Hervieu at Wyndham's Theatre, the play was
announced under the title "Which?" and as "Which?" it appeared on the
placards. Suddenly new placards appeared, with a new title, not at all
appropriate to the piece, "Cæsar's Wife." Rumours of a late decision,
or indecision, of the censor were heard. The play had not been
prohibited, but it had been adapted to more polite ears. But how? That
was the question. I confess that to me the question seemed insoluble.
Here is the situation as it exists in the play; nothing could be
simpler, more direct, more difficult to tamper with.
Two brothers, Raymond and Gérard de Gourgiran, are in their country
house, with their two wives, Giselle and Léonore, and two guests, the
old Marquis de Neste and the young M. de Vivarce. The brothers surprise
Vivarce on the stairs: was he coming from the room of Giselle or of
Léonore? The women are summoned; both deny everything; it is impossible
for the audience, as for the husbands, to come to any conclusion. A shot
is heard outside: Vivarce has killed himself, so that he may save the
reputation of the woman he loves. Then the self-command of Léonore gives
way; she avows all in a piercing shriek. After that there is some
unnecessary moralising ("Là-bas un cadavre! Ici, des sanglots de
captive!" and the like), but the play is over.
Now, the situation is perfectly precise; it is not, perhaps, very
intellectually significant, but there it is, a striking dramatic
situation. Above all, it is frank; there are no evasions, no sentimental
lies, no hypocrisies before facts. If adultery may not be referred to on
the English stage except at the Gaiety, between a wink and a laugh, then
such a play becomes wholly impossible. Not at all: listen. We are told
to suppose that Vivarce and Léonore have had a possibly quite harmless
flirtation; and instead of Vivarce being found on his way from Léonore's
room, he has merely been walking with Léonore in the garden: at midnight
remember, and after her husband has gone to bed. In order to lead up to
this, a preposterous speech has been put into the mouth of the Marquis
de Neste, an idiotic rhapsody about love and the stars, and I forget
what else, which I imagine we are to take as an indication of Vivarce's
sentiments as he walks with Léonore in the garden at midnight. But all
these precautions are in vain; the audience is never deceived for an
instant. A form of words has been used, like the form of words by which
certain lies become technically truthful. The whole point of the play:
has a husband the right to kill his wife or his wife's lover if he
discovers that his wife has been unfaithful to him? is obviously not a
question of whether a husband may kill a gentleman who has walked with
his wife in the garden, even after midnight. The force of the original
situation comes precisely from the certainty of the fact and the
uncertainty of the person responsible for it. "Cæsar's Wife" may lend
her name for a screen; the screen is no disguise; the play; remains what
it was in its moral bearing; a dramatic stupidity has been imported into
it, that is all. Here, then, in addition to the enigma of the play is a
second, not so easily explained, enigma: the enigma of the censor, and
of why he "moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform." The play,
I must confess, does not seem to me, as it seems to certain French
critics, "une pièce qui tient du chef-d'oeuvre ... la tragédie des
mâitres antiques et de Shakespeare." To me it is rather an insubstantial
kind of ingenuity, ingenuity turning in a circle. As a tragic episode,
the dramatisation of a striking incident, it has force and simplicity,
the admirable quality of directness. Occasionally the people are too
eager to express the last shade of the author's meaning, as in the
conversation between Neste and Vivarce, when the latter decides to
commit suicide, or in the supplementary comments when the action is
really at an end. But I have never seen a piece which seemed to have
been written so kindly and so consistently for the benefit of the
actors. There are six characters of equal importance; and each in turn
absorbs the whole flood of the limelight.
The other piece which made Saturday evening interesting was a version of
"Au Téléphone," one of Antoine's recent successes at his theatre in
Paris. It was brutal and realistic, it made just the appeal of an
accident really seen, and, so far as success in horrifying one is
concerned, it was successful. A husband hearing the voice of his wife
through the telephone, at the moment when some murderous ruffians are
breaking into the house, hearing her last cry, and helpless to aid her,
is as ingeniously unpleasant a situation as can well be imagined. It is
brought before us with unquestionable skill; it makes us as
uncomfortable as it wishes to make us. But such a situation has
absolutely no artistic value, because terror without beauty and without
significance is not worth causing. When the husband, with his ear at
the telephone, hears his wife tell him that some one is forcing the
window-shutters with a crowbar, we feel, it is true, a certain
sympathetic suspense; but compare this crude onslaught on the nerves
with the profound and delicious terror that we experience when, in "La
Mort de Tintagiles" of Maeterlinck, an invisible force pushes the door
softly open, a force intangible and irresistible as death. In his acting
Mr. Charles Warner was powerful, thrilling; it would be difficult to
say, under the circumstances, that he was extravagant, for what
extravagance, under the circumstances, would be improbable? He had not,
no doubt, what I see described as "le jeu simple et terrible" of
Antoine, a dry, hard, intellectual grip on horror; he had the ready
abandonment to emotion of the average emotional man. Mr. Warner has an
irritating voice and manner, but he has emotional power, not fine nor
subtle, but genuine; he feels and he makes you feel. He has the quality,
in short, of the play itself, but a quality more tolerable in the
actor, who is concerned only with the rendering of a given emotion, than
in the playwright, whose business it is to choose, heighten, and dignify
the emotion which he gives to him to render.