Acting in Elizabethan days was a presentative, rather than a
representative, art. The actor was always an actor, and absorbed his part
in himself rather than submerging himself in his part. Magnificence rather
than appropriateness of costume was desired by the platform actor of the
Drama of Rhetoric. He wished all eyes to be directed to himself, and never
desired to be considered merely as a component part of a great stage
picture. Actors at that time were often robustious, periwig-pated fellows
who sawed the air with their hands and tore a passion to tatters.
With the rapid development of the theatre after the Restoration, came a
movement toward greater naturalness in the conventions of acting. The
player in the "apron" of a Queen Anne stage resembled a drawing-room
entertainer rather than a platform orator. Fine gentlemen and ladies in the
boxes that lined the "apron" applauded the witticisms of Sir Courtly Nice
or Sir Fopling Flutter, as if they themselves were partakers in the
conversation. Actors like Colley Cibber acquired a great reputation for
their natural representment of the manners of polite society.
The Drama of Conversation, therefore, was acted with more natural
conventions than the Drama of Rhetoric that had preceded it. And yet we
find that Charles Lamb, in criticising the old actors of the eighteenth
century, praises them for the essential unreality of their presentations.
They carried the spectator far away from the actual world to a region where
society was more splendid and careless and brilliant and lax. They did not
aim to produce an illusion of naturalness as our actors do to-day. If we
compare the old-style acting of _The School for Scandal_, that is described
in the essays of Lamb, with the modern performance of _Sweet Kitty
Bellairs_, which dealt with the same period, we shall see at once how
modern acting has grown less presentative and more representative than it
was in the days of Bensley and Bannister.
The Drama of Rhetoric and the Drama of Conversation both struggled on in
sporadic survivals throughout the first half of the nineteenth century; and
during this period the methods of the platform actor and the parlor actor
were consistently maintained. The actor of the "old school," as we are now
fond of calling him, was compelled by the physical conditions of the
theatre to keep within the focus of the footlights, and therefore in close
proximity to the spectators. He could take the audience into his confidence
more readily than can the player of the present. Sometimes even now an
actor steps out of the picture in order to talk intimately with the
audience; but usually at the present day it is customary for actors to seem
totally oblivious of the spectators and remain always within the picture on
the stage. The actor of the "old school" was fond of the long speeches of
the Drama of Rhetoric and the brilliant lines of the Drama of
Conversation. It may be remembered that the old actor in _Trelawny of the
Wells_ condemned a new-style play because it didn't contain "what you could
really call a speech." He wanted what the French term a _tirade_ to
exercise his lungs and split the ears of the groundlings.
But with the growth of the Drama of Illusion, produced within a
picture-frame proscenium, actors have come to recognise and apply the
maxim, "Actions speak louder than words." What an actor _does_ is now
considered more important than what he _says_. The most powerful moment in
Mrs. Fiske's performance of _Hedda Gabler_ was the minute or more in the
last act when she remained absolutely silent. This moment was worth a dozen
of the "real speeches" that were sighed for by the old actor in _Trelawny_.
Few of those who saw James A. Herne in _Shore Acres_ will forget the
impressive close of the play. The stage represented the living-room of a
homely country-house, with a large open fireplace at one side. The night
grew late; and one by one the characters retired, until at last old
Nathaniel Berry was left alone upon the stage. Slowly he locked the doors
and closed the windows and put all things in order for the night. Then he
took a candle and went upstairs to bed, leaving the room empty and dark
except for the flaming of the fire on the hearth.
Great progress toward naturalness in contemporary acting has been
occasioned by the disappearance of the soliloquy and the aside. The
relinquishment of these two time-honored expedients has been accomplished
only in most recent times. Sir Arthur Pinero's early farces abounded with
asides and even lengthy soliloquies; but his later plays are made entirely
without them. The present prevalence of objection to both is due largely to
the strong influence of Ibsen's rigid dramaturgic structure. Dramatists
have become convinced that the soliloquy and the aside are lazy expedients,
and that with a little extra labor the most complicated plot may be
developed without resort to either. The passing of the aside has had an
important effect on naturalness of acting. In speaking a line audible to
the audience but supposed to be unheard by the other characters on the
stage, an actor was forced by the very nature of the speech to violate the
illusion of the stage picture by stepping out of the frame, as it were, in
order to take the audience into his confidence. Not until the aside was
abolished did it become possible for an actor to follow the modern rule of
seeming totally oblivious of his audience.
There is less logical objection to the soliloquy, however; and I am
inclined to think that the present avoidance of it is overstrained. Stage
soliloquies are of two kinds, which we may call for convenience the
constructive and the reflective. By a constructive soliloquy we mean one
introduced arbitrarily to explain the progress of the plot, like that at
the beginning of the last act of _Lady Windermere's Fan_, in which the
heroine frankly tells the audience what she has been thinking and doing
between the acts. By a reflective soliloquy we mean one like those of
_Hamlet_, in which the audience is given merely a revelation of a train of
personal thought or emotion, and in which the dramatist makes no
utilitarian reference to the structure of the plot. The constructive
soliloquy is as undesirable as the aside, because it forces the actor out
of the stage picture in exactly the same way; but a good actor may easily
read a reflective soliloquy without seeming in the least unnatural.
Modern methods of lighting, as we have seen, have carried the actor away
from the centre of the stage, so that now important business is often done
far from the footlights. This tendency has led to further innovations.
Actors now frequently turn their backs to the audience,--a thing unheard of
before the advent of the Drama of Illusion; and frequently, also, they do
their most effective work at moments when they have no lines to speak.
But the present tendency toward naturalness of representment has, to some
extent, exaggerated the importance of stage-management even at the expense
of acting. A successful play by Clyde Fitch usually owed its popularity,
not so much to the excellence of the acting as to the careful attention of
the author to the most minute details of the stage picture. Fitch could
make an act out of a wedding or a funeral, a Cook's tour or a steamer deck,
a bed or an automobile. The extraordinary cleverness and accuracy of his
observation of those petty details that make life a thing of shreds and
patches were all that distinguished his method from that of the
melodramatist who makes a scene out of a buzz-saw or a waterfall, a
locomotive or a ferryboat. Oftentimes the contemporary playwright follows
the method suggested by Mr. Crummles to Nicholas Nickleby, and builds his
piece around "a real pump and two washing-tubs." At a certain moment in the
second act of _The Girl of the Golden West_ the wind-storm was the real
actor in the scene, and the hero and the heroine were but mutes or audience
to the act.
This emphasis of stage illusion is fraught with certain dangers to the art
of acting. In the modern picture-play the lines themselves are often of
such minor importance that the success or failure of the piece depends
little on the reading of the words. Many young actors, therefore, cannot
get that rigid training in the art of reading which could be secured in the
stock companies of the generation past. Poor reading is the one great
weakness of contemporary acting. I can think of only one actor on the
American stage to-day whose reading of both prose and verse is always
faultless. I mean Mr. Otis Skinner, who secured his early training playing
minor parts with actors of the "old school." It has become possible, under
present conditions, for young actresses ignorant of elocution and unskilled
in the first principles of impersonation to be exploited as stars merely
because of their personal charm. A beautiful young woman, whether she can
act or not, may easily appear "natural" in a society play, especially
written around her; and the public, lured by a pair of eyes or a head of
hair, is made as blind as love to the absence of histrionic art. When the
great Madame Modjeska last appeared at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, presenting
some of the most wonderful plays that the world has ever seen, she played
to empty houses, while the New York public was flocking to see some new
slip of a girl seem "natural" on the stage and appear pretty behind the
picture-frame proscenium.