The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/The Theatre (December 1923)
THE THEATRE
ON the eve of Signora Duse's appearance it would be natural to write about acting—and it would be simple, too, if the current season gave that art honour except in the breach. I do not mean that there are no satisfactory performances; nor that there are many unsuccessful attempts at great acting. What I mean is that on the strict and legitimate stage the effort to act is rapidly disappearing. I have never seen Duse; but even if every report about her excellence were misleading, there could be no question of her intention, of her style. She is, by every account, an actress; and the necessity to be an actress, or an actor, is one of those compulsions which civilization, or something, has considerably relaxed. Its place has been taken by the opportunity to be attractive, or a "personality," or a character.
In the case of Miss Ann Harding the talent for acting is genuine, and it is only a question whether she will be able to resist much more dangerous direction than she received in Tarnish. (By direction I mean also the lack of it.) Too frequently the projected character slipped into something else—the remembered way in which some other actress imitated a still more distant progenitor in a similar scene. The play was exceptionally interesting for one thing, a matter of capital importance—that the interplay of two human beings (the father and the mother) entangled a third, and actually were the "forces" which created the situation. Neither the plot nor the theme was so good; but an internal rightness held the play together and should have taught the director to prevent Miss Harding from ever falling out of character.
The Swan is a great satisfaction, and as far as Mr David Burton is responsible for it, he is responsible for the nearest thing to an unmixed delight I have seen-this season. Miss Hilda Spong has been quite unintelligently criticized for over-acting. She is simply a perfect baroque, wholly in the tone of one side, the comic side, of the play. I have never seen Miss Le Gallienne play so well—although I wonder whether she does not err in the other extreme. It is all too tragic, too seriously conceived, too consciously the great young actress who can do second-rate poetic drama. She has a certain gift for comedy which she suppresses, in the interest not of the myth she creates, not of the character, but of herself. There is another flaw in the piece, and that may be the fault of the audience. The highest comic moment is when Mr Merivale, as the Prince, kisses the tutor—a precise parallel to the highest dramatic moment, an act earlier, when the Princess does it. The second kiss was accepted as being also dramatic; it should be pure comedy.
I should be happy to believe that every player in every piece required the director to announce, at the beginning, what the style of the piece was, and that every audience required all the players to be
in that style. Galsworthy's Windows and Molnar's Launnzi were both directed without any such integral conception of the style of the play, and the disastrous failure of the latter was the result. It was a psychological drama in which the external events after the first act meant nothing, and it seemed all played for these events. If Windows turn out a success—it will not be the first time The Theatre Guild has Shaw to thank.
I had the good fortune to see The Ziegfeld Follies after time and pressure of time had eliminated most of its excrescences. In the thirty-odd remaining numbers there are still some dreadfully soft spots, rapturously acknowledged by the audience (as is the Garden of Kama in the Greenwich Village Follies by an audience which underrates the fine macabre work of the Two Briants and the other excellent acrobats there). Even apart from these spots Mr Ziegfeld's offering is not enough of a climax to be a farewell. For one thing there isn't enough humour, nor are there enough good songs. The best song was introduced for Miss Ann Pennington and is, I think, by Louis A. Hirsch. Miss Pennington and Eddie Cantor substituted for Bert Wheeler, and he must be very good indeed to require both of them as a makeweight. They cheered up and jazzed up the piece considerably. Miss Brice by a wise decision cut out all her sentimental songs and scenes, and some of her comic ones are in her highest vein. Edna Leedom and Linda are the other high spots—not to speak of the high swinging of an attractive chorus.