The Play
Skinner, R. Dana
November 25, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 79 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER The Modern Clothes Hamlet AFTER seeing this highly interesting and partly successful production which Mr. Liveright has...
...I say this in spite of certain distinct reservations to be noted presently, and because I have come to admire, above all else in the work of this important group, the courage they show in risking popular misunderstanding...
...Stanley Logan acted well as Don Juan, but he allowed the overtones of his voice to blur what ought to be an extremely crisp and delicate diction...
...So, to me, at least, there is no theatrical conflict or incongruity in having characters in modern dress talk in blank verse...
...As a background, they lend sweep and power to the drama set against them...
...In spite of these reservations, this production is one of the most interesting and invigorating of the season to date...
...It is a play of intellect rather than warm emotions...
...It is just one more theatrical convention to accept...
...So much for the general aspects of this adventure...
...And who can say that even the introduction of the ghost, as an objective figure, is incongruous in times when sedate scientists prattle about ectoplasms...
...Basil Sidney merits an honorable comparison with other interpretations...
...But I do feel that the three principal characters received inadequate treatment...
...It has been overbold where reverence was a dramatic necessity, and scrupulously exact and traditional where the literal spirit might be considered a dramatic vice...
...Rostand's Don Juan is an example in point of a work that commercial managers would shun...
...Their work is sometimes inchoate, incomplete or roughly fashioned...
...It is much too good for Broadway—wherefore our sincere thanks to the Greenwich Village pioneers...
...They have done more to prod the American theatre to a higher standard than any other group...
...They seem to care too much for artistic expression for its own sake, and not to delve deeply enough into the dramatic ethics of certain plays they select...
...It would violate the genius of Shakespeare's drama far less to alter the text slightly and call the kingdom Graustark than to retain the name and exhibit a court which gives no sense of being a court at all...
...The Last Night of Don Juan I DON'T know when I have been more pleased with a production of the Greenwich Village Theatre (meaning Messrs...
...In all those moments of the Liveright production when the essential dignity of the piece is maintained, it achieves a stirring reality and force...
...In fact, as one friend suggested to me, it is highly possible that the success of this new convention (new to us, for it was surely a convention in Shakespeare's own day) may lead to a revival of verse as a dramatic vehicle in plays of contemporary life...
...The direction of Robert Milton shows a firm and deft hand particularly in the difficult scene when Don Juan finds himself surrounded by the ghosts of his former loves...
...And I think if you would ask twenty people at random from the audience of this new Hamlet, you would find that most of them had forgotten by the third scene that the speech seemed strange or irreconcilable...
...Hamlet must, for example, express the essence of a court or of a seat of government...
...They have struck some popular successes which I would much rather have seen fail...
...Magowan, O'Neill and Jones) than in this version of Rostand's Don Juan...
...And Miss Cooper's voice as the White Shadow was somehow too light and too metallic to carry the full illusion of spirituality which her gestures and pantomine conveyed with such exquisite grace...
...Even what we have come to regard as the most colloquial and realistic speech of the modern theatre would reveal under analysis almost nothing in common with the speech of daily life...
...There is no real reason why one should be afflicted with the anarchronism of ancient Danish politics presented in highly modern terms...
...The Hamlet of Mr...
...I am confessedly unacquainted with the etiquette of modern court life...
...but there is a very definite reason why one should create the illusion that this action takes place at the seat of a powerful government...
...It may be argued against me that in certain lesser courts today the familiar friends of a young prince dress in coats with only one button, or wear trousers sadly in need of pressing, or look as if they were happier in an automat than at a formal dinner...
...This is the quality which Hamlet needs to achieve Shakespeare's purpose...
...The theatre at best, as Gordon Craig so often points out, is but a tangled mass of conventions...
...Readers of this page may recall that I have often been in sharp disagreement with what was formerly the Provincetown triumverate, but never on the score of the artistic impulse back of their work or of their courage...
...For government and its dignity are universal and enduring ideas...
...But for the present purpose I am not interested in modern court gossip...
...She never dominated her part...
...The abundant humor of other scenes and lines becomes more sharply defined in proportion as costume and mannerisms more readily give us the key to the types represented...
...Its sharp senility was captivating...
...Sidney's Hamlet is neurotic and emotional throughout...
...The division into scenes, with incongruous curtain calls, is another convention...
...The scene of the King at prayer I have never caught with such full power before—thanks partly to the finely graded acting of Mr...
...Augustin Duncan showed a clear understanding of the devil, but with a rather dulled edge...
...But there is no more sincere group of workers to be found in the American theatre, and none whose influence has spread farther, even to the commercial strongholds of Broadway...
...Liveright has presented, I am convinced that it will give rise to a future and more completely successful production in the same spirit...
...It is not a Hamlet I like—now that Walter Hampden's performance has convinced me that Shakespeare intended to create an heroic figure...
...The defects are not, I believe, inherent in the idea itself, but spring rather from a lack of appreciation for the universal elements which drama must express if it is to be durable...
...One felt that she was approaching it through childish emotions rather than maturing intelligence and deeper feeling...
...To conclude the list, a word of praise should go to the Polonius of Mr...
...In the first scenes this was plausible and convincing, but the mood endured too long...
...The sense of torture and repression became monotonous...
...It is in neglecting to create this central illusion, rather than in any accident of the period of costume, that the Liveright production fails...
...Even a dissolute court—and there have been all too many in history—has its outward mask of ceremony and dignity...
...Waldron, but quite as much to the fact that we have here a universal problem stated in immediate and recognizable terms...
...What I would like to see, as a dramatic background for a compelling tragedy, is the definite illusion of dignity, appropriateness, grace and restrained manners which are of the essence of all seats of strong government of all times and all places...
...If you are more sanely inclined to think of the ghost subjectively, modern psychologists are more than ready to show you why it is a powerful dramatic symbol...
...Of the contrast between the poet's majestic lines and the familiarity of modern costume, there is no genuine cause for complaint...
...Miss Helen Chandler's Ophelia was a disappointment, in spite of its charming simplicity and pathos...
...It never achieved maturity and heroic force...
...Rooms with only three sides are conventions...
...The King, I have already mentioned, and the Queen of Miss Morrison was effective in the closet scene, if lacking in essential dignity elsewhere...
...It is sharp, sensidve, keen in its underlying philosophy, ruthless in its irony, and devastating in its subtle blasts at the libertine who has never loved anything but himself (sometimes as reflected in others) and whose greatest punishment is the fact that he has created nothing...
...Sidney Howard's translation of this play is delightfully in keeping with its mood, as are the highly imaginative stage settings of James Reynolds...
...Lawford...
...They have recorded some failures which were purely heroic...
...Make-up is a convention...
Vol. 3 • November 1925 • No. 3
