THE THEATRE.
AN ODD MIXTURE.
?I TRILBY," AT THE APOLLO THEATRE—" THE BEG- GAR'S OPERA," AT '1111.1 LYRIC THEATRE, HAM- MERSMITH—" HEDDA GABLER," AT THR KINGS.. WAY THEATRE.
Tgaoron a variety of circumstances I went to a curious collection of plays last week, how curious did not strike me until I sat down to write with the three programmes before me. One was The Beggar's Opera, the other was Hedda Gabler, and the third was Trilby. Yet all three have something in common—they are good of their kind, though poor little Trilby shrinks to a pigmy size between the other two, giants of the theatre as they are- a Wotan and a Gargantua. Yet Trilby is an ingenious play. Only just at the moment it seems utterly and completely beside the mark. It is a play that makes the mildest reader of Morton Prince, of Jung, of Compton Mackenzie, of D. H. Lawrence feel terribly Did and sophisticated. Even with that most beautiful creature Miss Phyllis Neilson-Terry as Trilby, and with Mr. Lyn Harding as an agile temperamental Svengali, the play cannot come to life. Not for one instant can we credit it "with the credit due to a drama." Especially did. it seem incredible because they do not even in this production dress the women in sailor hats, puffy sleeves, wasp waists and muslin pussy-oat bows under their chine, and not one of the men had a coat cut as it should have been— high at the neck, showing n2t an inch of waistcoat—nor were their trousers right, nor their ties. The only period touch was Talbot Wynne's beautiful blond Dundreary whiskers. No, as I sat there I found my mi4d sliding off Trilby and arranging a marriage between Hedda Gabler and Captain Macheath, or a lawsuit between Judge Brack and Mr. Peachum.
How completely of the mood of the moment is The Beggar's Opera, the musical comedy that lacks but six years of being two hundred years old. It is curious how old-fashioned that agree- able play at Daly's, The Lady of the Bose, shows beside it. I wonder if the revolution of the wheel of fashion is about two hundred years ? Shall we feel the immediacy of the Natural History Museum in a hundred and twenty- five years ? But, of course, a chronology of taste is all nonsense, for there is Hedda Gabler, virtually a contem- porary of Trilby, which hits our modern nails on the head just as well as do the "noisy crew" of The Beggar's Opera. No, it is a matter of a surfeit. We of the present generation have been fed too long on the chocolate eclairs and ice pudding of the last age. There is a tartness, a salt irony, even a dash of bitter- ness about The Beggar's Opera that suits the mood of the age. "But," objects the reader, " surely the present age lean idesdietio one ? " indeed it is, but the ideals so agreeably flouted in Gay's laughing satire are not its ideals. They are rather of the stuff of which Ibsen made his tragedy. I suppose one of the chief of these ideals (I hope we shall soon have a new Beggar's Opera to tease us about it, or we may get very solemn) is our belief in. the right of every human being to self-expression. That lies behind what is called modern aesthetic antinomianism, just as it lay behind the suffrage agitation ; and that is the central motive of the tragedy of Hedda Gabler.
Hedda, was adventurous ; Hedda was creative ; Hedda lived in a town where a gentlewoman could not walk home at night unattended, where she could not run a shop, or write a book, or "go out into the world to seek her fortune." So all that power turned first to sex, and then, when maturity came, to a bitterness of boredom. When the curtain goes up, there is the beautiful creature spoilt irretrievably, and, like a rotten apple, ruining everything she comes in contact with. How odd it seems to think that for a long time everybody believed that Ibsen was a realist ; indeed, I believe Hedda Gabler especially was taken to be a very matter-of-fact sort of play. The Master Builder, with its "younger generation thundering at the door," its "harps in the air," its "homes for happy human beings," its houses that must have a tower to them, was, I suppose, at least thought of as a photograph touched up. But now, when we see it being acted by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Mr. Charles Quartermaine, Mr. Ivor Barnard and Mies Dorothy Holmes- Gore and the rest of an admirable cast, it seems exceedingly fantastic. There is a kind of half-madness in Hedda, the beautiful apple in its decay has fermented to a kind 'of deadly wine. There is something terrible in hearing Mrs. Campbell's' deep voice say slowly : "Oh, I? I can do nothing—only bore myself to death !
Hers was a wonderful performance. She is a Hedda worn out, terribly still and immobile, almost revoltingly kind, to her little Tesman, not even taking any trouble in her rudeness to Miss Tesman, and listening, like a tiger, with a kind of purring luxury to the love story which she drags, point by point, from poor Mrs. Elvsted. It is a marvellous play. I hope we shall have an opportunity of seeing the present production again.
TARN.
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