19 JUNE 1852, Page 11

Orittrro nub 31Inoir.

The custom of producing new pieces on the occasion of benefits, which was once deemed heterodox, seems daily gaining ground. " Cessante cessat effectus," is an axiom which probably holds good in this case. According to the old creed, the audience on a benefit night being friends of the baneficiaire, were deemed too goodnatured to be fair judges of a piece, and therefore novelties were brought out before a more rigid tribunal. Now, however, audiences are always goodnatured ; they will applaud anything in five acts, from the loftiest sublime to the lowliest twaddle ; and in such an atmosphere of benevolence, distinctions between grades of kindliness are too subtile to be observed.

Mr. and Mrs. Charles Kean's benefit, sanctioned by the presence of Royalty, was signalized by the production of a dramatic batch of horror, entitled The Vampire. Everything has been done to make the piece showy and extravagant; nothing has been done to make it poetical. It is but an expansion of the old idea of the Vampire as played at the Lyceum years ago ; and as this expansion causes the blood- sucking feats of the daimon to take place at intervals of a hun- dred i years, his career is cut up into three separate stories, too short to be interesting, and far too like each other. At the present day, terror is a means that may be fairly used to touch the nerves of a blasé public, but it should be a nicely-managed terror, artfully worked up through successive degrees of intensity. A crowd of desmons and spec- tres massed together without any show of development or purpose will not suffice. Mr. Bourcicault, the well-known author of several very clever pieces—and, we regret to add, the author of this also—made his histrionic debilt as the human fiend, and played the part with much care and discrimination.

Mr. Buckstone's benefit, unblest by the Royal presence, but attended by as hearty a crowd of auditors as ever filled a theatre to suffo- cation, was marked by the production of a new five-act piece from his own pen, called The Foundlings. He has taken in hand a French farce, named after Captain Marryat's Japhet in Search of a Father, and similar to that novel in idea, and, retransplant- ing the subject to British soil, has fitted himself and Mr. Keeley with two of the most comically-talking and comically-acting per- sonages that ever trod the stage. Buckstone is the seeker, sharp and restless in his search ; Keeley is the man possessed of information, ever on his guard, lest he should allow some valuable fact to escape him gratis; and nothing can be more laughable than the manner in which the siege is kept up on both sides. But, having provided such a rich banquet of fun, which might have filled out three good acts, why did the author swell the subject into five, by the introduction of a tedious story of a girl in humble life beloved by a nobleman, but constrained to disgust him, that she may prevent a messiliance ? The two plots no more blend to- gether than oil and vinegar ; and we are reminded of the tale of the honest Puritan divine, who, considering the Pilgrim's Progress too enter- fAining, introduced some reflections of his own, on purpose to make it dull.