The Play
Skinner, R. Dana
June 19, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 189 THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Revival of Becky Sharp p ERHAPS no commercial manager--not even George Tyler himself---could have produced a more...
...But there are still thousands, even millions of people, who pass their whole lives without so much as suspecting the deeper currents, or who, suspecting them and failing to understand them, use them merely for inane conversation at the feast of petty ambition...
...He has always shown fine sincerity with moments of real power...
...A consecutive month would hardly have provided enough people the chance to see what a really capable group of artists, giving themselves with sheer devotion, can do, not only in acting, but in direction, stage-setting, incidental music, costuming and inner spirit...
...The very name of the play, of course, brings Mrs...
...Fiske is the name that endures above all others, and were it not for the living evidence of the present revival, one might be tempted to think that her inimitable skill rather than the play itself was the cause of its long and persistent popularity...
...I suspect that Miss Ellis's performance on this occasion has set the seal of superlative excellence on her work for good and all...
...His rooms always tell you the story of the people living in them long before any character speaks...
...The older generation fairly bristled, with two such characterizations as the Miss Crawley of Cecilia Loftus and the Sir Pitt Crawley of James T. Powers...
...The famous scene of the Brussels ball during the Battle of Water- loo would, of course, present real difficulties...
...There are, to be sure, deeper currents at work now--currents turned and twisted by religious confusion, by lack of accepted moral authority, by fatuous experiments reaching to the depth of human life and social organization...
...Miss Ellis never makes her fine intelli- gence obtrusive...
...But Langdon Mitchell now shows more clearly than ever his right to be considered the only successful dramatist of Vanity Fair...
...Vanity Fair does not attack any typical prob- lems of today, but for that very reason it penetrates more fully into problems which are of today, of yesterday and of tomorrow...
...Patricia Collinge, as Amelia Sedley, gave one of her self-effacing per- formances in which rare skill conceals itself perfectly under the mantle of the mouse...
...The piece has splendid vitality today, and although the author gave the Players free rein to make any needed changes and modernizations of the script, rumor has it the version now pre- sented is very close to the classic original...
...The scholarly mind on the stage is apt to result in reverent dulness...
...First there is the direction of Dudley Digges...
...Arthur Hohl as Pitt Crawley and Donald Brian as George Osborne were more than acceptable, leaving Ernest Cossart, as Joseph Sedley, to give the cross strokes to an almost perfect etching...
...They are a veritable prologue, uttered in a brief space after the rise of the curtain...
...It would be difficult to find in the work of any younger actress so wide a range handled in every instance with such complete and honest artistry...
...But Mrs...
...Then there were the settings by Robert Edmond Jones, conceived and executed with that illuminated atmosphere which he knows how to create better, perhaps, than any scenic artist of today...
...It merely presides, with nice judgment, over characterizations illuminated by swift and glamorous intuition...
...A word, too, should be reserved for Helen Freeman, in the almost silent r61e of the Duchess of Richmond...
...Today he has achieved versatility as well--an uncommonly capable actor...
...Here and there, as embroidery, one could pick situations which might not have the same impact on a modern audience as was orig-inally intended...
...What a pity that the conditions are such that this delightfully rounded bit of work could last but one short week...
...Fiske...
...Tyrone Power, George Arliss and Henry E. Dixey are a few of the illustrious players who have taken the part of Lord Steyne, and Rawdon Crawley has had the talent of Maurice Barrymore, John Mason and Henry Stephenson...
...Call it a play of eternal petty tragedy, and you will see why it is so intensely modern...
...Miss Ellis's work has, above all, that rarest of combinations, intuition and intelligence...
...The essential modernity of the piece lies in its spirit--in that quality which makes a play truly universal because not unduly bound to fleeting conventions...
...Irresponsibility, social ambition, ruthless hypocrisy, the results of an overplayed hand, the reckoning which society demands, the emptiness of small victories--what are all these but the stuff of the game as played today...
...But that is not my point...
...His presence, from the second act on, pervaded the play like an evil portent...
...The classic r6le of Lord Steyne was played with duly sinis- ter restraint by Moffat Johnston...
...It is the petty tragedies which fill life without filling it full--thin measure for the Olympians, turmoil aplenty for the run of men...
...Heading the list was Mary Ellis--plunging bravely into the r61e which one might almost call the private property of Mrs...
...This scene constituted a true example of orchestration of characters, carried swiftly to its dramatic conclusion without obvious trickery or exaggeration...
...In the matter of acting, the Players have seldom been more fortunate...
...But almost any edition of the daily newspapers will give us a replica of the Becky story in its final washing out in court or in grim tragedy...
...Even in the large spaces of the old Knickerbocker Theatre, it played to capacity and even to standing room...
...His skill in handling groups was never better seen than in the Duchess of Rich- mond's ball, where the sway and movement of the dancers and the gamesters was set in counterpoint to the emotionM play of individuals...
...Her Becky exhibits a complete range of expression from malicious comedy to the tragedy of defeat and moral decay...
...Possibly the modern systems of credits and collections would make it a trifle more difficult to "live well on nothing a year," at least to live so indefinitely...
...Sydney's work of late years has been a constant progress from heavy mannerisms to fluid ease...
...Finally, we had the intelligent and expressive performance of Basil Sydney as Rawdon Crawley...
...But basically, the story of the gold-digger and snob married to the reckless spendthrift fits almost any age and almost any country except the deeply oriental...
...Perhaps the truly modern play should concern itself with these things rather than the surface of the everlasting Vanity Fair...
...Becky is one of the few period plays which one feels could easily stand the test of a presentation in modern dress...
...The present production is notable for many things...
...September, x899, was the date of the first production, and its last New York revival with Mrs...
...Fiske to mind---even to the minds of those (like myself) so unfortu- nate as never to have seen her in the r61e of Becky...
...June 19, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 189 THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER The Revival of Becky Sharp p ERHAPS no commercial manager--not even George Tyler himself---could have produced a more completely satisfying revival of Langdon Mitchell's Becky Sharp than The Players Club, this last week...
...Fiske was in I9II...
...It was a case of sheer stage presence holding together a kaleidoscopic scene...
Vol. 10 • June 1929 • No. 7
