The Play

...For this reason, if for no other, he throws into sharper relief that conflict of obligations which becomes the core of nearly every Greek tragedy...

...Unfortunately, Ralph Roeder was unequal to the demands of Orestes...

...Roeder...

...In that silence, through which her words rose, there hung the ghosts of mothers of the heoric dead, of wives desolate before empty years, of sisters forever torn from the hope of a brother's return...

...Without it, the scenes between this unhappy queen and Electra would have lost much of their magic...

...She does not try to be archaeological and thereby to recapture the illusion of ancient times...

...Nor does she strain for an obtrusive realism...

...In this the Greeks were thoroughly Occidental, with little or none of that admixture of introspection which Judaism and, later, Christianity brought to the West...

...It was the essentially classic Electra of Sophocles which Miss Anglin chose to present, in Edward Hayes Plumptre's translation, rather than the Gilbert Murray translation of the Euripides story...

...Miss Anglin gave a resonant rebuke to that large group of actors who do not know the difference between spoken lines that sing and singsong lines...

...If ever there comes a time when Miss Anglin establishes a repertory theatre in New York, it would be a program of surpassing interest to have her present both versions of the Electra...

...It had the surge of tides, but no scurrying wavelets...

...This conflict has, of course, its counterpart in every human soul...

...Euripides does not emerge entirely from this view of overmastering fate...

...His pantomime—for, of necessity, it became little more than that—had a certain studied excellence, an occasional biting ferocity...

...His account of the chariot race in which Orestes is supposed to have" died showed that off-stage happenings may be made ever so vivid when the words themselves speak life and the actor has mastery over them...

...Thus in Euripides, we find Electra and her brother Orestes driven almost to madness by the necessity of killing their own mother to avenge her murder of their father...

...Roeder was almost inaudible, even from seats well forward...

...We would understand better our kinship with what we call antiquity, and realize, perhaps, that simply because its memories have come to us in pallid marble, we have sinned against our own imaginations in allowing ourselves to forget the color, the variety, the storms of soul and mind that were Athens and are still humanity...

...Perhaps, after such an experience, we would cease to think of the Greeks as being cast all in one mold, and catch some of the fire of conflict which blew across the populace of Athens...

...This famous device, of bringing in the gods to settle the insoluble, embodied, in Euripides's day, a certain dramatic irony which might easily be lost today...

...But Mr...

...But for the main body of the play there can be no doubt that the Euripides characters are more human because more indecisive and tortured than the majestic figures of Sophocles...

...The consciousness of free will seems to be scant...

...It is no easy task to play effectively the part of a man whose heroic proportions are dwarfed by the tragic intensity of an Electra...

...In spite of the surging vitality of any of the Greek masterpieces when they are interpreted with understanding and power, there is something in the force of sheer words as well as the ideas they express, and Plumptre's verses have little of the flowing and majestic beauty which is so a part of anything Gilbert Murray writes...

...There was a certain majesty, too, and an ample characterization, in the Clytemnestra of Ruth Holt Boucicault...

...Before such mastery, all other efforts dwindled...

...It is really only in writings of Euripides that we begin to feel the indecision and frailty of human nature, the sense of subjective torture which reached its height in Hamlet...

...To arrange for stage settings and costumes, to select the huge cast, to train the chorus in the quiet beauty of its gestures and movement, to achieve the perfect synchrony of music and spoken word, to accustom the voices to the vast spaces of the Metropolitan Opera House and the complicated lighting to the flowing mood of the play— these tasks alone would baffle most producers...

...The unnatural deed becomes a thing of pitiable horror, whereas in the Sophocles Electra, it remains simply a tragic and stern duty, which they fulfill with the ceremony of a religious rite...

...Hers, after all, was the only performance of true greatness...

...But beyond this, there is the essential difEerence between Sophocles and Euripides which places the latter even closer to modem understanding...

...But that is not enough...

...Again, the lines spoken individually by the chorus of Argive women had often a secondary beauty that only served to heighten the perfect rhythm of their gestures and the slow and constantly changing grace of their groupings...

...In Sophocles, it is at the behest or command of a god that humans are charged with fulfilling a vengeance, and these commands are accepted and obeyed implicitly, the tragedy gathering force from the very helplessness of the human instruments involved...

...The voice of Michael Strange, as Electra's sister Chrysothemis, also caught some of the wizardry of the hour, and as the foster-father of Orestes, William Courtleigh filled his scenes with a simple and strong nobility...

...the tragedy lies in the punishment heaped upon him for a deed done against his own will...

...Throughout this performance...

...It had, so to speak, cadence without cadenzas...

...It became a scene, not of mutual joy, but of momentary exaltation for Electra alone, made strong only through the seemingly boundless reservoir of Margaret Anglin's power...

...But add to this the brief time allowed, and the fact that all this effort was devoted to the object of two performances, and the wonder is, not that occasional imperfections crept in, but that Miss Anglin achieved the masterly ensemble she did, and that over and above this she reserved the power to give a personal performance of thrilling stature...

...The Greeks were, perhaps, more utterly aware of it than the people of any time or place since, but their awareness was essentially objective...

...Their desire to do right assumed a larger emphasis...

...For her diction did have the quality of a chant, the fine rhythm of a sustained phrasing, but without the suspicion of being sung...

...I am not sure, in retrospect, that it does not stand forth as the only momentous and truly great performance I have seen on the English-speaking stage...

...The central quality, indeed, of Miss Anglin's production is its modernity—not of costume, but of spirit...

...He resented the impossible situations in which they were sup^ posed to place human beings...

...Euripides found himself more in rebellion against the anthropomorphic gods of Greece...

...The strange forces impelling the characters of their plays came from without—from the spite or jealousy or offended dignity of gods...

...On this point, there must, of necessity, be some regrets...

...Yet there were others in the cast who did well...

...But his very resentment of a theology which identified crime and sin (the outward act with the inward guilt) was so great, that he instinctively gave a deeper humanity to his characters...

...The recognition scene lost at least half of its drama because of Mr...

...The moments of greatest dramatic intensity in the Sophocles story come with the anguish of Electra at the supposed death of Orestes, or with the horror (for the audience) of Clytemnestra's murder...

...Something greater than the actress herself was astir, something ageless in the human soul, the summation of the crucifying torture to which man can be put when torn between seemingly irresistible forces...

...The utter falsity of the idea that, to be modernized, Hamlet must be presented in modern clothes, was never more clearly demonstrated...

...The possibility that man could bring such conflicts on himself, through his own obstinacy or perversity or weakness, is barely hinted...

...Yes, Margaret Anglin had ceased to exist, and only the ageless grief of woman mourned her dead...

...Their torture at being compelled to do wrong became more tense, more pitiable, more tragic because more closely linked with their wills...

...The Euripides Electra has, of course, one great defect for modern presentation, and that is the appearance in the last scene of Castor and Pblydeuces...

...Margaret Anglin in Electra THERE were moments during Margaret Anglin's performance of Electra in the Metropolitan Opera House recently when the veil seemed to be lifted before the shrine of greatness—moments when, in the incomparable words of Gilbert Gabriel, critic of the New York Sun, one entered the presence of "a horror as hot and beautiful and unapproachable as fire itself...

...Sorrow mounted through her, like the notes of a great composer reborn through an instrument, and passed from her to those who watched and trembled in silence...

...Miss Anglin's Electra follows no set or traditional style...

...It is in this sense that his spirit is more classic...

...If she does not succeed in this at all paints of the drama, there is sufficient explanation in the hurried circumstances attending its production...

...The tragedy of a typical Greek hero, called upon to perform a deed of horror, has almost nothing in common with the introspection, the hesitancy or the fateful decision of Hamlet...

...The responsibility rests outside of the character himself...

...At such a moment as her outpouring of grief over the urn supposed to contain the ashes of Orestes, there passed through that great house something of the lonely and tragic grief of womanhood since time was born, that terror without exultation which comes only to those who are left alone...

...No one else could bring to our consciousness with more force the eternal modernity of both plays, nor give us a fresher understanding of the amazing mental contrast between two of the world's greatest playwrights...

...Tragedy beyond the ken of individual experience, but born with life itself into the heart of every woman in the world...

...Sophocles is calmer, more absorbed in the general majesty of his theme and less alive to the anguish of soul of his characters...

...At those moments, Margaret Anglin ceased to exist for herself...

...Thereafter one feels a definite anti-climax in the murder of Aegisthus and in the lack of interior torture on the part of either Orestes or Electra...

...Her one object is quite evidently to transmit the reality of the emotions of the characters, and thus to lift the play out of time and place and endow it with universal strength...