CONTEMPORARY ARTS
EXHIBITION
THIS exhibition, organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Society for Cultural Relations with the U.S.S.R., is of rather more specialised interest than the other exhibitions given in the past year at the National Book League headquarters in Albemarle Street. Students of Shakespearian production, and perhaps even students of Shakespeare, will find the exhibition of the first interest ; but to the general public its chief appeal may be its demonstration of the development of English taste—almost (you feel inclined to say in front of some of the exhibits) of the decline of English, taste.
The exhibition, which fills three rooms, consists of a fine assort- ment of engravings and photographs of Shakespearian productions and decor, pinned up on canvas screens : while early editions of the plays, and acting versions from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, lie open in glass cases. The chronological span of the exhibition is impressive : on the one hand there is an interesting facsimile of the Peacham drawing belonging to the Marquess of Bath, dated 1595 and illustrating a passage from Titus Andronicus ; on the other a set of very beautiful " stills " from Laurence Olivier's film Henry V. There is, of course, a great crowd of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portrait engravings and lithographs- " Mrs. Margaret Woffington " in The Merry Wives, Miss Bellamy and Mr. Garrick, Mrs. Siddons, Miss O'Neill, Madame Vestris and Fanny Kemble and Harriet Faucit.
One's general impression is that the eighteenth-century producer, who mangled and perverted Shakespeare's text and took little trouble to achieve real period costumes, did set up a standard of simple and straightforward presentation and establish a tradition which the Victorian actor-managers, in all their antiquarian zeal, betrayed. There is something 'pathetic, bin also something terrible, in the pictures of mid-nineteenth-century productions of Hamlet or of Henry VIII—the vast encumbered stage, the. crammed perspective, the great throngs of courtiers ; in theatrical criticism, " ornate " was then a term of praise. The antiquarian school seems to have reached its apogee with Forbes Robertson's hideous production of Romeo and 7uliet at the Lyceum in 1895. But in another ten years the tide had begun to turn. " It was bound to come," runs a charming quotation in the catalogue, taken from a 1912 newspaper review of Granville Barker's Winter's Tale, with scenery by Norman Wilkinson. "Here, like it or lump it, is post-impressionist Shakespeare. . . . It is very startling and provocative and audacious, and on the whole we like it." To our eyes this famous production seems pretentious, almost grotesque, as we look at these dead photographs : but was it not perhaps as serious as, and certainly more virile and less self- conscious than, many of the Shakespearian productions of the twenties and thirties of this same century—which are likewise pro- fusely illustrated at Albemarle Street. Nothing seems so dated as the fashions of the immediate past.
The inevitable limitation of this excellently planned (and superbly catalogued) exhibition is that it shows us only the changes of outward fashion and of visual interpretation to which Shakespeare's plays have been subjected throughout four centuries. As you look at all these photographs you feel that something is perpetually eluding you —the gestures of Garrick, the step of Mrs. Siddons, the sound of
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