Image TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage TileImage Tile
Image size: 7168x10240 Scale: 35% - PanoJS3
Page overview thumbnail

Article text

REPERTORY THEATRE
Laughter and Tears
5--LIFE OF AN ACTOR
(By Benjamin Blair)
The curtain drops and silence, cold
and cheerless, succeeds the warm proxi
mity of an applauding audience. The
tragedian wipes the paint off his face,
and seeks the privacy ot his happy
lhome--a great man.
Even such a dilettante as David Gar
rick felt the littleness of his 1.fe's work
when he wrotc
"The painter's dead, yet still he
charms the eye,
While England lives his fame shall
never die.
But he who struts his hour upon the
stage
Can scarce protract hIis fame through
half an age,
Nor pen nor pencil can thle actor save,
Both art and artist have oni common
grave."
The height of an actor's ambition is
to be ':beside himself" in a studied
madness. His life is made un of mimic
laughter, and tears; his thoughts are
not his own, his person is sold to the
procurement of a scrupulous verisimili
tude.
RECOGNISED TYPE
What is an actor nowadays? Gener
ally, chosen because heis a type which
will assist in the stimulation of illu
sion this being the essence of drama
tic production. HIe learns, or is taught,
all the tricks of a London or New York
predecessor. He spends six months
touring the five capital cities before
joining the ranks of the unemployed
waiting for something to turn up,
something in his own recognised type,
until at last the shell of that type
thickens over his mentality.
Most actors are trained and bound in
the chains of traditions as inflexible as
King's Regulations. Their reading of
character is only that of "young.or old,
light, heavy, or comedy," in melodrama
comedy, or the "legitimate." The old
Grecian bronze masks could not impose
a greater deprivation of the finer shades
of corelative psychology.
Birmingham amateurs, who were
iconoclasts enough to break with tradi
tions, set a new standardl in Great Bri
tain 20 years ago, sooled on by such
dramatists and critics as .3ernard Shaw
and Drinkwater, and proclaiming by
their artistic success that it is unneces
sary to indulge in a frenzy of peripate
tics right and left while chatting in a
woman's drawing..room.
I merely quote one of the many tra
ditions of dress, type, tricks, curtains,
exits. and entrances. The amateur has
been an excellent mentor to the pro
fessional if, for no o:,ther reason, than
the breaking up of some hidebound tra
ditions and the opening up of a new
field of literary drama, which the think
ing public now 'lema:idfl.
SECRET JOY
The call of the stage forces one to the
belief that there must be a secret joy
in the vocation. Not only is it pleasant
in itself, but it gives pleasure to others,
and is'therefore worth an analysis.
There are few greater pleasures of the
mind than to see a great actor bring be
fore us in the flesh an embodiment of
CAPT. ROALD AMUNDSEN Latest photograph of the famous Nor wegian explorer, who is now engaged in an attempt to reach the North Pole. ,------ ------ - ----___ Help
CAPT. ROALD AMUNDSEN
Latest photograph of the famous Nor
wegian explorer, who is now engaged in
an attempt to reach the North Pole.
,------ ------ - ----___
some character we have before only
dimly envisaged in our library.
What, therefore, are the qualifications
of a good actor, shall we say, a great
actor, for no actor ever imagined him
self merely a good one, and he is as
sisted in his self-assessment by the fact
that his art cannot be submitted to any
comparative test of time. There may
have been finer Hamlet's than his, but
the proof of his success is in the con
temporary applause and money of the
town, and no record of his art can re
main to account for his fame. His
credit is interred with his bones.
His qualifications should be an intel
ligence to understand a character, and
also the faculty of representing a
character. Culture, and knowledge of
human nature, will assist in the first
condition, but the finest intelligence in
the world will not enable a man to play
Hamlet without the second condition
which is built of mimetic power and
the faculty of reproduction.
A poor actor will add nothing to the
written part, fill no gaps, and construct
nothing; but to the great actor the writ
ten, play is no more than the skele
ton of his creation.
ART OF SPEAKING
Then there is the art of speaking
-naturally on the stage, of simulating
the intlections of ordinary convcrsatign,
and not adopting some stilted metlfod
of .delivery, which only succeeds in
spoiling the effect. I refer here to dis
coursive, and not poetic, drama. The
latter must have a more distinctive
treatment.
One should not speak verse as- one
talks prose. There must be a more
euphonic sonority, a more chastened
appreciaiton of the beauty of language
and of sound. It is here that the com
petitive elocutionist rushes to dcestruc
tion in over-emphasis, forgetting that
a work written in verse has many re
dundant words which are really only
symbolic of the muse's fertility, and
merely used to ornament a predominant
idea. They really have a subsidiary
significance, and their accentuation
should be subordinated to the main
thought.
Emotionally, the actor will always be
the same, but the warranty of his pro
fession is mellowing. He is changing
with the times. No longer is the
"barn - storming, astrachan - collared
poseur accepted as a histrionic genius;
he is superseded by a sentient artist
wiJdely read in dramaturgy.
No longer are we intrigued to exas
peration by the pseudo actress, whose
conception of anguish is to let down
her hair and grovel on the stage, and
there is no field for disnute in the asser
tion that it is the National Theatres of
France, Norway, and Germany, and
the Repertory Theatres qf Great Britain
and Australia, which h ve naturalieed
the stage. .
$