The first performance of the present season, in what the
man- for a change in the King's intention which shall permit her own ager fairly called the " New " Olympic Theatre—so thoroughly daughter, instead of the unwilling half-sister, to become the wife is the building renovated and beautified—has brought out of the new noble. The elder child is grateful because she is powers quite unsuspected except by a few in a young actress of attached to her cousin, a physician who has studied the then new -great capacity, Miss Kate Terry, and has raised Mr. Henry Neville, sciences of physiology and chemistry. The younger one is still displayed is, as usual, a thoughtful adaptation from the French, In the second act she has but partially recovered, and is wheeled evidently not made without special reference to the capacity of the about, apparently a paralytic, in her chair ; but the poisoning of the young actress who gives the great charm to the piece. It is some- youngest daughter has begun. The grandmother, knowing of Lady
first gratitude and then love. Lord Penarvou returns from his but the best school of theatrical art in England. repenting its guilt, and finally winning over her husband to ask
Penarvon, and is found to contain the record of guilty feelings, and one sentence in which she expresses her belief that if it should appear she had a rival either she or her rival must die. We need not carry the story further. We have said enough to show that suspicion of the worst of all crimes, the murder of her own daughter from jealousy, falls upon the penitent wife and mother in the midst of her anguish at the daily declining health of her child. The young physician has disoovered the nature of the complaint, and that the attempt, though no one knows to whom it is due—the grandmother is held guiltless in consequence of her seeming paralysis—is renewed by some inscrutable means day by day. Miss Terry as Lady Penarvon has to express the conflicting emotions of shame, returning tenderness for her husband, indignation and horror at his fearful suspicions, the intrepid love for her child which defies all attempt to separate the two, and something almost of momentary maternal fury when, still smarting herself under suspicion, she discovers that the origin of the attempt is at last divined, but the surmise con- cealed, by the granddaughter of the guilty woman, who simply urges her sister to leave the castle at once, and hesitates of course to denounce the criminal. It is scarcely possible to speak too highly of Miss Kate Terry's representation of these various and subtly blended emotions. There is nothing of the conventional actress about her. She is always refined, delicately refined in manner, and yet the compass of 'swims passion she throws into her part more than satisfies her audience..Thehauteur equally mingled of resentment and embarrassment with which she receives her husband's first entreaties for pardon, the restrained pride of her manner, half accusation, half repulse, in telling him that he cannot hope to re-kindle the passion which his own neglect and coldness have extinguished,—the working of her face when her daughter pours her own passion into her ears, are all finely given. But the scene in which her husband confronts her with her own written confessions, accuses her not only of unfaithful- ness to him, but crime against her child, is perhaps the finest in the play. Self-accused, she at first cowers at his feet a confused iudistinct figure, all the outlines lost, in the depth of her shame and remorse ; but when she hears herself charged first with heart- lessness, then with guilt towards her child forwhom she sacrificed her passion, she gradually draws herself up in amazement and indigna- tion, till at last she turns upon her husband, her head thrown back, her eyes dilated, but without the faintest tone of rant, in a storm of wounded feeling. The intensity and yet delicacy of passion with which she delivers the passage ending, "the wife you have a right to accuse, but you shall not outrage the mother," is, we think, the best piece of tragic acting by an English woman we have ever seen. We do not know how wide may be the compass of Miss Kate Terry's power, but we who saw and admired her in the " Duke's 'Motto" and in Ophelia with Mr. Fechter had certainly no conception of its extent. She is exceedingly well supported by Mr. Neville and Mr. Coghlan, and could the grandmother be represented by a better actress than Miss Bowring, whose dumpy self-satisfaction of expression contrasts ludicrously with the hate she tries to pour forth, the play would be one of much power. As it is, Miss Terry's acting alone ought to give it a very wide popularity.
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