The Play
Skinner, R. Dana
June t6, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 161 THE...
...It reminds one to be...
...The reviewer was once asked to deliver an address before the Beside the excellent Lady Percy of Peggy Wood, Blanche Y. M. C. A. in Buenos Aires, and spoke at some length on Ring added a goodly share of enjoyment by a fulsome and the history of that city, where the earliest Associated Charities skilful portrait of Mistress Quickly ably assisted in the comedy in the new world were founded...
...So much of it is given over to an account of obviates at once the feeling that the battle scenes are merely Mr...
...F RESH from the triumphs of characterization attained in What Price Glory, Laurence Stallings, one of its authors, But it is a little difficult to ascertain, after reading the innumerable quotations which consume the greater part of Mr...
...course, in the perfection of individual performance, but in the The love of a man for his wife never shone more clearly undue prominence attained by small parts and the general through the surface crust of a warrior than at these moments...
...I wish that every actor have allowed New York to see this play for the first time in of importance on the American stage could have been brought thirty years...
...has written the scenario of one of the most effective motion pictures launched this year...
...plete attitude of familiarity...
...But in Henry the rich humanity of the lines a complete and constant panIV, just as we find ourselves engaged in the interests of Hot- tomime which meant as much as the lines themselves, if not spur, the immortal Falstaff turns our tears into laughter and more...
...and there Prince Hal himself was merely acting in all his escapades with are few such problems more serious than that which the Falstaff and the ruffians of the Boar's Head Tavern, so con- author mentions on Page 380: "It is a well-known fact that scious and deliberate a Prince Hal as Mr...
...Disregarding for the moment both the glamour by hook or crook to see this portrait given us by Mr...
...The Falstaff of Otis We must be content, then, to consider Henry IV in the Skinner was the kind of work that one sees two or three times nature of a double bill entertainment-a comedy and a roman- in the course of a generation-flawless, the summit of an tic tragedy with many chances for acting of a very high order...
...Sydney was good enough for those fields...
...It is quite true that one must be able to see in the general impression has been in the past that any kind of a vagabond Hal something of the approaching dignity of a king, person would do to send as a missionary to Latin America...
...From the special cap which I have mentioned, of the divided interest in draprologue written by Brian Hooker and delivered in herald's matic action, Mr...
...Skinner...
...in purple or rags...
...And how about our divorce problem...
...It is really not one play, but two...
...Sydney's is hardly in Protestant missionary circles in the United States that the credible...
...According to Mr...
...Inman's personal visits to prominent South Americans stock news reels resurrected from war days and served up that one rather gathers the idea that he considers himself as with a slender thread of story to bind them...
...This new Sir John was not even unbelievably fat...
...The that made you feel that in the remote past Sir John had, pertheme behind his revolt reminds one strangely of Brutus with- haps, merited his knighthood...
...Individual on the battlefield became a moment for honest and unsentistars do not always lend themselves with perfect grace to en- mental tears...
...Skinner's able dramatic force and high moment...
...But these same mannerisms hardly fit son of Otis Skinner...
...We must The Big Parade realize that they have produced some of the world's greatest men...
...Unless you accept the theory that P ROBLEMS in Pan-Americanism is well named...
...He was roistering, vulgar, out the ponderous stupidity which is apt to make this hero keenly alive to the art of self-preservation, and irrepressible in rather weighty...
...of the actor became self-conscious...
...Other excellent portraits in davia and San Martin-we want to hear about leading these the long cast included the Henry IV of William Courtleigh, people to God" Comment seems superfluous...
...the dramatic interest...
...Sydney did 162 THE COMMONWEAL June i6, 1926 not give a bad performance...
...This out this volume...
...Inman studied some of the writbits of photography and mass direction...
...giving forth work is to call it complete...
...Incidentally, and the Lady Mortimer of Eileen Huban...
...Inman so vioEnemy where the preachment is so obvious as to lessen greatly lently accuses...
...There was a flow and rhythm to every movehibition of plain genius that it ends up by quite overshadowing ment, and never a moment in the performance when the art the story of Hotspur...
...the Falstaff of Otis Skinner could be made comparable in Inman notes that "change of attitude must come in this counpopular interest to the Cyrano of Walter Hampden...
...Merivale made Hotspur ring with all the costume by John Drew to the least of Falstaff's extraordinary splendor of romantic fervor, youthful temper, and sudden quick recruits played by so capable an artist as J. M. Kerrigan, there humor which Shakespeare must have intended...
...And throughout the performance Julius Caesar centers around Brutus would undoubtedly make there was never a moment when Mr...
...But he was not a mere lout...
...something which will foreshadow and explain the later de- People who have not had the intellectual and spiritual qualivelopments of Henry V. But to effect this impression it is fications to be sent to the Orient have at times been sent to surely unnecessary for the young prince to appear to be acting Mexico and South America with the thought that anything a part throughout all his contacts with Falstaff...
...One's natural sympathies go out to Hotspur, his good humor...
...The Big Parade keeps rigidly to its The allusions to the development of commercial relations purpose of telling a story-a story that proceeds with a swift, between Latin America and the United States are particularly sure action, ample love interest, and genuine though not over- disappointing...
...Time and has probably never been a cast of greater competency or in- again his utter naturalness completely broke through the diffidividual skill...
...In this respect it counts written by Latin Americans of their visits to the United seems to me a far more skilful piece of propaganda in the States...
...Please note that Mr...
...In spite of the handielsewhere at this thin end of the season...
...At the same time it manages in a very on his self-appointed "survey of social conditions"-and many forceful way to impose its own conclusion as to the futility of his surveys could be very pleasantly paralleled with acof war when reckoned in its human cost...
...He had his very fine moments, but they were confined in a general way to the more serious BOOKS and elocutionary passages...
...irreverently of a first-class libretto for light opera...
...The chapter enI have ever seen has managed to catch in an equal degree, the titled Early Efforts Toward Pan-Americanism is sketchy and grinding power of the war machine as it ate up men, steel, superficial, and utterly fails to show how it was that the early hopes, ambitions, and illusions...
...To list the entire cast of the Players' Club revival would be As a close second to Mr...
...Certainly no war film that competition for the Latin American market...
...Perhaps the best description of Mr...
...Inman, on its advancethe memory of those fortunate enough to see it...
...The war scenes are a conscientious attempt to ground or to analyze in any detail the subject of international picture conditions as they existed...
...No sentences in his book are truer into theatrical history...
...In the amusing scenes with his wife, Lady semble production...
...Yet, in spite of all these handicaps, the It will be recalled that Mr...
...He was not satisfied to give us two totally different moods connected only by the tenuous the surface of Sir John-vast though that surface is supposed thread of young Prince Hal's wanderings...
...No attempt is made to give any historical backdone pathos...
...I say advisedly came to us through the person of Prince Hal...
...The result in effect reminds one at inter- Percy, so buoyantly and archly played by Peggy Wood, the vals of the spirit emanating from amateur theatricals.-not, of play suddenly caught the quaintness of a domestic comedy...
...The reviewer is more than disappointed at story of the American part played in the great war, but it manages by skilful manipulation of plot to center the inter- the lack of historic background everywhere noticeable throughest effectively on the four or five principal characters...
...admirably in Hotspur...
...New the ease and naturalness which Mr...
...gives us none of the free and complete abandonment to a merrier mood which alone would account for Falstaff's com- What are these "intellectual and spiritual qualifications...
...Merivale achieved so York: George H. Doran and Company...
...Somewhere ment there appears to hinge the solution of many, if not most, there may be a commercial manager who will recognize that Pan-American problems...
...confused note which evidently seemed to him the key to Sir John, in this revival, came back to us through the per- Hamlet's character...
...It is almost unnecessary to add that in a per- culties of the dramatic situation until the death of Hotspur formance of this sort there are many rough spots...
...atmosphere in the audience itself which takes a naturally keen Perhaps the weakest performance of the revival, measured and friendly delight in the appearance of its favorites whether by the opportunities it offered, was Basil Sydney's Prince Hal...
...artistry that is almost lost to us today...
...and it is refreshing to find that Mr...
...The Big Parade is, of course, a Inman's book, as to just how this change of attitude is to be accomplished...
...June t6, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 161 THE PLAY By R. DANA SKINNER Henry IV Otis Skinner because this distinguished artist gave as fine an W E have to thank the Players' Club of New York for a exhibition as I have ever seen on the stage of the complete very important contribution to this year's theatrical sea- suppression of self in order that the character of the jovial son and, incidently, to the history of the drama in New York- old knight might completely live again, unhampered by time, for by reviving part one of Shakespeare's Henry IV, they space, or the personality of an actor...
...What he conspicuously lacked was Problems in Pan-A4mericanism, by Samuel Guy Inman...
...It is try [the United States] if we are to have a real friendship not a performance which should be allowed to pass quietly with Latin America...
...Yet the stage business which he used was never mere sweeps one like a gale through the realms of rich low comedy- business, never simply an excuse for keeping hands, face, or, not mere comic relief, but such a pungent and glorious ex- feet occupied...
...For other generation of playgoers the extraordinary sweep of that purpose his slow and excessively clear-cut diction which, Shakespearean characters, the long unheard beauty of many by a special trick or mannerism, seems to follow his thought of the lines, and above and beyond all, the most amazing by a perceptible interval, served to add to the neurotic and character of theatrical time, Sir John Falstaff...
...The Y. M. C. A. secretary management of the Boar's Head Tavern by the inimitable in charge was horrified : "We don't want to hear about RivaFrancis of James T. Powers...
...Skinner did not add to a drama of great power, sweep, and romance...
...than the following: "We must realize that in Latin America there is a cultured class equal to any in the world...
...His soul, if and a play that centered itself around him as completely as not his body, was romantic...
...Skinner's of the theatre...
...carefully, he could have vastly improved his treatment of...
...He was fat enough, it is true, to justify Prince Hal in calling As a re-creation of old England and the rebellion led by him a "ton of man," but he was not so fat as to make his Henry Percy against his king, we have a story of consider- mere entrance upon the battlefield an absurdity...
...one of the discoverers and pioneers, and that little or nothing You can look long and hard to find any unpatriotic senti- of any value had been done, said or written before he entered ments in this film...
...since the reviewer's religious beliefs prevented-and still preIn spite of the difficulties of the play itself and all the minor vent-his affiliating himself with the Y. M. C. A., it is imcriticism which might be brought to bear, this revival had possible for him to state what the policy of that organization many features which will make it live long and gloriously in is in Latin America...
...Has our treatment of our own Indians been one whit cause of peace than a play such as Channing Pollock's The better than that of the countries whom Mr...
...It belongs to the living stage...
...There was something in him best brief character studies that Shakespeare ever created...
...2.00...
...King Vidor, its direc- ings to which he alludes in his bibliography a little more tor, has achieved here something of real importance...
...This Henry Percy, Sir John was a man first and foremost, human, loyal, lovable, surnamed Hotspur, is, to my way of thinking, one of the and transparent as a June sky...
...and awe attaching to anything Shakespearean, one is tempted Our stage at the present time is conspicuously weak in actors to be somewhat heretical and to note that as a play it lacks who have either the talent or the courage to achieve a true nearly all of the unities essential to creating the full illusion plane of artistry...
...There is lots of humor scat- commercial contacts broadened into the first official and diplotered throughout the picture and many extraordinarily fine matic relations...
...Had Mr...
...Skinner's performance, I would to name nearly every prominent actor not actually employed put the Hotspur of Philip Merivale...
...Sydney's modern Hamlet was a revival of Henry IV was a notable event in bringing to an- very interesting, if not fully convincing, piece of work...
Vol. 4 • June 1926 • No. 6
