THEATRIC REALISM.
THE success of Mr. Boucicault's play " The Streets of Lon- don" throws a curious light upon the present taste of the English public. Night after night for sixty nights the Princess's Theatre has been crammed to the roof till the gallery looks like one of those quaint photographs full of tightly packed faces, with crowds anxious to applaud a play whose only merit is a rough and partial realism. The story itself is a crude mixture of a scene from " Hard Cash," David Dod's arrival at Mr. Harding's bank, and a French play called " Les Pauvres," and the French portion has not been very carefully adapted. English people do not stifle themselves with charcoal, either in sight of an audience or out of it, nor do English policemen release criminals arrested on warrants from motives of high-flown generosity. The dialogue though pointed is not better than the ordinary dialogue of plays which do not succeed, and very much inferior to the dialogue of either the " Colleen Bawn " or the " Ticket of Leave," and the acting is of the poorest and most conventional kind. Everybody looks h;s or her part decently, but except the gentleman who represents the fraudulent banker, whose shrewd villany and courage are the only genuinely dramatic feature in the play, and Mr. Vining, who acts the fraudulent clerk, nobody realizes even the common-place ideas which the piece contains. The comedian will not understand the distinction between comedy and buffoonery, and acting for five minutes—when he brings news of the fire—almost as well as Toole reduces the rest of his part to an absurd pantomime. Paul the vic- tim of the fraud is a stick who does not even stand silent effectively, while Miss Barnett's expression of the bard-hearted, purse-proud, over-petted London girl is very much what a ladys-maid's would be if she tried to assume the character. Even Mr. Vining, who un- doubtedly can act, succeeds only in the first half of his part, giving the shrewd scoundrelly clerk very fairly, and the clerk returned from California perfectly, but acting the clerk ruined but comic with too single an eye to the notion of fun entertained in the gallery. Still with all these drawbacks the piece succeeds, for it has in it, as we said, a rough, inartistic realism, more especially of locale. One scene is laid at Charing Cross on a winter's night, and the spectators having just seen it outside welcome it inside with boisterous applause. It is capitally painted to begin with, and the hot-pie man and the man who walks about with an illuminated advertisement on his head, the policeman and the boy who tum- bles, the chesnut furnace, and the woman who begs are all introduced, and all with one exception are as real as if just hired out of the streets, as is very likely the case. The exception is the woman who has to do something beyond. looking the part, and who ac- cordingly begs with a scream for which if she did it outside she would be taken up by the police. The whole is, however, well arranged, and the delight of the audience with a scene which gives them nothing to think about, which they can criticize minutely without fear of error, and which appeals to the memory and not the imagination, is most amusingly exuberant.
London from Hampstead is not quite so well done, at least it has never been our lot to see Hampstead under that Florentine atmosphere, but there is a crowning tableau. A house in some lane off Covent Garden is set on fire, burns and explodes before the audience, while the regular crowd of loafers,
street girls, street Arabs, policemen, firemen, and horses make up a scene of noise, confusion, and excitement which keeps the breath of the house suspended. It is really a most creditable piece of car- pentery and arrangement, and we only hope for the sake of the lessee and the owner that Mr. Lloyds, who designed it, knows the use of tungstate of soda, for if the canvass once caught the flame of those spirit lamps, precaution would not be of much avail. The final scene seems poor and ineffective after the grand " effect," but the audience depart delighted, having seen and heard nothing except an indifferent repetition of what they see every day. The taste for realism, which is the taste of the hour and in its way a sound one, has been gratified, and author and lessee will probably realize thousands by a piece which, if the scene were laid in Paris, would not run a week. Will nobody take advantage of the new fancy to give the theatre-going public a genuine play, a drama of the life of to-day, with all this scenic realism and some- thing else besides, a dialogue worth hearing for itself and a plot reasonably interesting and consistent? Is all the plot-making ability in England consumed in making novels, or does the want arise from the absence of a link between the playwright and the manager? The latter may have, and we think has, something to do with it. It is the natural temptation of managers to apply for aid only to known " hands," men who have succeeded, and the difficulty of getting a play acted at all unless written by a known London professional checks or suppresses invention. Why should not managers act like publishers, announce that plays sent them would really be read, and pay by success, so much for every acting night ? There must be dramatic ability sufficiently intelli- gent to comprehend the taste of the hour left somewhere or other in the land, and a successful piece nowadays must pay well. The poverty of the theatres has become a tradition, and though the change has not yet attracted many educated men to the stage, it LAS given managers energy and hopefulness enough to try experi- ments. In a country which once had the richest native repertory in the world, it cannot be necessary for lessees to rely exclusively on adaptations made from the French, and in their English dress either so unnatural that they fail from the first, or, like the catas- trophe in the " Streets of London," so nu-English that the pit at. the moment of horror does not see what is going on, or, IA* " Gabrielle de Belleisle," so " improper " that the adapter is com- pelled to sacrifice the point, and make the plot absurd lest English morality should take just offence. People are wanting to see to- day on the stage, and not last century. Who acts Lord Popping- ton?—but Lord Dundreary brings a fortune. A drama as good say as the " School for Scandal," but filled with the people of 1864, and surrounded by the accessories which modern skill in carpentry can produce, seems to be the thing required, and it surely cannot be wholly beyond the range of English inventiveness.
Previous page
