THEATRICAL TASTE AND MANAGEMENT.—THE LYCEUM AND OLYMPIC.
BoOTH the Lyceum and the Olympic have started afresh this week. Mr. Fechter has re-opened his theatre after an un- usually long recess, and Mr. Horace Wigan has changed the principal pieces and materially altered his troupe of actors. Both these gentlemen are themselves actors of no ordinary merit, and Mr. Fechter has shown a power for the greatest and most intel- lectual part in the whole range of the drama such as the English stage has not, for the last thirty years at least, displayed before. Yet the greater of the two actors has shown decidedly the worse . taste of the two as a manager, and even Mr. Wigan, though by his admirable choice of a first piece and the almost perfect assignment of actors to their parts he shows his power of management, dis- plays in his choice of the new comedy, in which he sustains, and sus- tains with all the ability of which it will allow, the principal part himself, apreference for intrinsically vulgar situations and exhausted jokes that tells very ill for his own individual taste. Mr. Fechter has chosen pieces of a rapidly descending order of merit from Hamlet down to The Watch Cry, which last has no merit at all, except splendid scenery and gorgeous dress. Mr. Wigan, while putting such a little gem on the stage as Mr. Tom Taylor's old drama A Sheep in Wolf s Clothing becomes in the hands of the present performers, puts side by side with it a piece of worthless farce in three acts, which, but for some acting that is far too good for such stuff, would rely for its entertaining power wholly on a running fire of facetious allusion to those immoralities and vices which for some reason that we do not comprehend are supposed to be laughable. Why do managers, who understand so well what an actor may achieve, think so ill of the public as to dose them with these poor and in part deleterious drugs? Of all the five pieces which are now being acted at the Lyceum and Olympic Theatres, but one can give any real pleasure to anything but the eyes of the audience, and as for the pleasure of mere gorgeous effects, five shillings laid out in fireworks would be more remunerative in agreeable dazzle to the optic nerve than the divertissement so absurdly interpolated in the second act of the melodrama at the Lyceum, or the tincture of pun and spectacle in Prince Camaralzaman at the Olympic.
The truth is, we believe, that really good actors have so mach power over their audience independently of the particular part they play, that they rapidly become more and more indolent in the expenditure of their own effort. Finding they get about the same amount of mere external applause, whether they act a great part which it requires their best effort to fill, or make a poor one look as if it had a great deal more in it than it has, they constantly diminish their demands on themselves, till at last they trust to little more than their power of expression to command the sympathy of their audience for the vaguest and silliest trash. When Mr. Fechter bounds on to the stage with the rich play of expres- sion on his mobile countenance and fulness of life in every move- ment, he would probably be clapped if he were not acting a part at all, but only showing how many and how various shadows of smiles can pass over his face in a single minute. When Mr., Horace Wigan lets that air of dry perplexity complicate the hard lines of settled worldly knowledge on his face, his audience would laugh if he were only repeating hoary jokes out of Joe Miller or no jokes at all. Men with faces like Mr. John Parry have only to come on to a platform and everybody laughs before they open their months, and so all good actors, whether their power is comic or not, have a certain command over their audience which is in great measure independent of the part taken and the success with which it is taken. There is a remarkable instance of this in the new piece at the Lyceum. In Mr. Fechter's part of Leone Salviati there is absolutely nothing of a character, nothing specific to act. The man is loyal to his chief, attached to his wife, is imprisoned for fifteen years in a dungeon, and has to go through other exciting adven- tures. He pretends to be dumb in order to save his own life, and afterwards avails himself of the deception to save the lives of others. But there is nothing in all this to distinguish him from hundreds of thousands who might happen to be placed in the same position. There is no fixed channel to define the character at all. Loyalty, and love, and a little scorn, he has to show, and he has to choose for himself how to show them. There is no character to study, and consequently Mr. Fechter studies nothing except how to throw as much life into his face as possible. In the pantomime, when he acts the part of a. dumb prisoner, who has been shut up for fifteen years, he throws a good deal too much life into it, and gesticulates more like the man Friday fresh from banquets on his enemies, than like one reduced by hard fare and the solitary confinement of years. Throughout the part Mr. Feebter evidently feels that he may mould it at the moment as he pleases, and need confine himself to no specific conception at all, and hence there is really no unity in it. We have Mr. Fechter promising loyalty to a chief, Mr. Fechter parting tenderly from his wife, Mr. Fechter making signs of gratitude or defiance, Mr. Fechter defying an enemy, but as he is not throwing himself into the attitude of any character, but only into a very inde- terminate situation, in which he feels free, within certain very easy limits, to look precisely as he pleases, there is little or no pleasure in his acting beyond that derived from the astonishing elasticity and verve of his power. There cannot be illusion with- out something much more closely defined in situation, if not in character. Nobody can form any estimate of what the expression in any iarticular scene ought to be, because nobody has any idea connected with Leone Salviati himself, and the various passions appealed to by the situations of the play are half-pointed out, exceedingly confused, and vague. Mr. Fechter is at large, as it were, throughout, making immense play with his flexible countenance, but with no distinct purpose intelligible either to himself or his audience. There is no sufficient idea in the part to delineate. He is like a painter mixing colours on his palette for mere effects of colour without any artistic aim. That is a great deal easier to him, we do not doubt, than painting a specific pic- ture, and it pleases an audience much as rich colours please a baby's eye, apart from any form. But it is not acting.
Not precisely the same can be said of the trashy three-act piece called A Cleft Stick, at the Olympic, which it was unworthy of French art to compose, and of Mr. Oienford to adapt to the English stage,—because the situations are definite enough, though very vulgar, and stale to the last degree. But it is not by acting these stale jokes, but by looking as if they were making much better jokes, that Mr. Wigan and Mrs. St. Henry contrive to amuse their audience. The text of this silly piece may serve them as mere sign-posts in what direction to use their mental control over the expression of their countenance, but in real life we are quite sure they would not throw half the expression into their face over pleasantries so fiat and antediluvian. The interferences of a mother-in-law, the jealous suspicions of a wife, the empty jollity of a drinking companion are the well-worn subjects for this unhumorous comedy, and it only shows how much better are some of the actors than the piece, that they can make something out of situations so hack - flied. The points, if they may be called such, of A Cleft Stick, are as much too small and destitute of dramatic value from their pettiness, as the points of The Watch Cry are too loose, and vague, and destitute of dramatic value for their want of clear definition. Mr. Fechter fails in his new piece from providing no well-marked dramatic channel for his genius to flow in at all, Mr. Wigan from providing so very narrow a ditch that he can only succeed by over- flowing it.
In strong contrast to these wretched pieces is the old one re- produced at the Olympic to which we have alluded, and acted with a perfection that has not often been equalled. The piece is slight enough, but its situation is full of interest, and that a most dramatic one, and clearly-defined, so that the audience feels what kind of dramatic expression is wanted, and yet large enough and sufficiently worthy of effort to tax the powers of a good actor. A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing is a story suggested by the brutality of Colonel Kirke's " Lambs," the brutal regiment which was guilty of so many cruelties after the suppression of Monmouth's rebel- lion in 1685. The idea of the plot is exceedingly simple. The wife of Jasper Carew—the latter a rebel supposed to have perished on the field of Sedgemoor,—affects to be a keen Royalist, and even to en- courage Colonel Percy Kirke's addresses, in order the better to shield her husband, who is really hiding in her house. For this purpose she has to feign a political tergiversation she detests, not only to the people of the little town of Taunton, but even to Jasper Carew's own mother, a bitter Whig, who believes her son really dead, and to part with her little daughter to this grandmother, lest the child should discover her father's presence and not be able to simulate ignorance. The great point of the play is the delineation of the various and conflicting feelings in the wife's heart, love and terrible fear for her husband, something like absolute enjoy- ment of the part she has to play in fooling the brutal Colonel, and inventing excuses to keep him at a distance and delay the marriage for which he presses, eager yearning for her child, grief at the bitter charges brought against her unjustly by her mother-in-law, and, with it all, a state of intense nervous excite- ment which alone sustains her spirit through the emergency. All this is played by Miss Kate Terry with far more skill than we have yet seen exhibited by her in any previous part. It is an exquisite piece of acting, free, delicate, always graceful, and now and then rising into great power. When Colonel Kirke is pursuing her for a kiss, and, she having unguardedly called out for help, her husband opens the door of the closet where he was concealed to come to her aid, the scream of laughter with which she arrests at once Kirke's pursuit, while his back is still turned to the cupboard, and her husband's exit, and calls out—really to both alike, though apparently only to Kirke—" A truce, gallant colonel! Promise me not to stir a step from where you are, and I'll tell you why I object to your salute," is as fine a piece of acting as we have seen for years. The laugh is full of hysteric excitement, of warning to her husband, of feminine artifice, and abrupt generalship. Nor could the varying tenderness of her averted face when the servant (not in the secret) is telling her a story of her child whom he has met in the streets, be easily surpassed. When he tells her how the little one still longs to come back to her mother she is all but in tears,—when he says she gave him her cake to eat she smiles as if she saw the little thing making its present, and when he tells her how nothing will induce the little one to think ill of her mother, she lightens suddenly into
triumph, soon to relapse into tears. How Miss Terry manages to turn pale with fright when " Kirke's Lambs" are on the point of discovering her husband we cannot conceive, but she certainly does do so, and the colour returns slowly to her face as the danger passes, as if the danger were real and not artistic. She has taught her little sister, too, to act the child's part with most art- less art. Miss Florence Terry is already (at nine years old per- haps) a simple and promising little actress. Nor are the other parte much less perfect. Mr. Neville never acted better than in Jasper Carew,— showing both humour, tenderness, and impatient courage. Colonel Kirke is admirably represented by Mr. Maclean,
and the rough Somersetshire servant—even a more difficult part—
quite as admirably done by Mr. Soutar. It is not an ambitious piece, but one more nearly fulfilling the conditions of a true domestic situa- tion, well suited to the powers of the actors and yet taxing them to the utmost, it would not be easy to find. Why cannot actors so able as Mr. Fechter and Mr. Wigan take some pains to choose pieces which, like this, will not only not injure, but raise the dramatic taste of their audience? We do not expect managers to do what is now done at the Adelphi; in Rip Van Winkle, that is, allow the genius of an individual eater its full swing even when it goes quite over the heads of the majority in the pit, and even the boxes, but they might at least endeavour to choose the best parts an English audience can appreciate, instead of administering so freely vulgar spectacle and vulgarer jokes.
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