The Play
Skinner, Richard Dana
THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER Gluck's Orpheus FOR one entrancing week, the Provincetown Playhouse, now installed uptown in the Garrick theatre, revived their production of Orpheus. It is very...
...This leads us to Richard Hale...
...The glamour of a social function is added by the presence of rich patrons in boxes...
...His or her salary is a matter of public wonderment...
...Of the principal singers in this revival, Richard Hale is, unfortunately, the only one to emerge with distinction...
...It is very sad to have to write of this event in the past tense-and seemingly unnecessary, too, since the revival played to crowded houses and stirred an enthusiasm quite rare along the fringe of Broadway...
...Irene Williams as Euridice is much happier in vocal expression, but lacks dramatic intensity and the appearance of ethereal youth necessary to maintain complete illusion...
...One is close to the tragedy, and the music becomes, as it should, merely an exquisite medium for heightening the dramatic action...
...One seeks an ideal future, the other yearns for a vanished past, and in their unreal worlds they meet, only to find the anguished tragedy which we call the frustration of a dream...
...Instead of feeling, as one does so often with opera, that an attempt has been made to blend two irreconcilable forms of expression, one is aware simply of a perfect harmony of intent and a single artistic whole...
...But it is well worth writing about none the less, first as a record of fine achievement, and secondly, as a hint to all lovers of music and drama to be on the watch for still another revival at some later date...
...Opera as such becomes odious-a clumsy mastodon...
...Nowhere is this more certain than in Elsa Findlay's direction of the chorus and ballet...
...But in the final tragic note, in the pitiful mental anguish of Peter, as so sensitively and beautifully indicated by Leslie Howard, you are more apt, I think, to feel the touch of that unhappy nostalgia which, if unchecked, can take so fatal a course in lives about us...
...Also true that Miss Williams is a sylph and a mere child in comparison with many of the noted sopranos of our Metropolitan stage...
...True enough...
...His soul and his love are with the lovely Helen-Helen who died at the age of twenty-three years, 140 years before...
...In fact, I very much doubt if, after the first flush of appreciation has faded, it will carry enough emotional conviction to win a wide and permanent audience...
...Perhaps the greatest curse of opera, as presented in most of the great cities of the world, is pretentiousness...
...The famous singer dominates everything...
...But in the story of Peter Standish, we have the hint of a tragedy of major proportions-of the whole life of a soul tied to a dead past, hopelessly in love with memories not even his own, the cruelty of the dream cutting into the lives of those about him...
...How utterly Greek is the feeling which Richard Hale conveys throughout Orpheus...
...Balderston has his Peter Standish transport himself bodily, as if through a newly discovered magic based on the relativity of time and space...
...The present-day Peter is engaged to be married, but his interest in present happenings is rapidly giving way to a deep love of the past, a love so enthralling that he cannot even go out of the old house...
...It is the balance which turns a political visionary into a practical statesman...
...How accurately, for example, we might describe this play as the meeting of two souls, without regard for time or space, who refuse to live in the real world about them...
...No longer efficient...
...There is the plodding clerk who, in his daydreams, is a master of finance...
...Berkeley Square BEFORE the winter is over, much will be written about John Balderston's play, Berkeley Square...
...This, you may say, is a criticism one would never think of making in the case of familiar opera, where two-hundred-pound heroines in the late forties are the rule rather than the exception...
...The phantasy as written is one of sickness, of mental and spiritual regression-told with loving grace, acted with inimitable tenderness, and ending in that heartrending despair which all men find who seek escape in the maze of an enthralling dream...
...At the Lyceum Theatre...
...At first his dreams give him comfort, but soon they make the dull reality seem unbearable...
...The grotesque and distorted dance of the underworld spirits in the second act, and the slow serene movements of the spirits of the Elysian fields in the third carry the inner meaning of the dance to a new perception and dramatic intensity...
...You can enjoy its quiet satire of both past and present and its innocent humors, as when Peter astounds his ancestors with epigrams from Oscar Wilde and with his forecasts of events still to happen...
...Peter Standish, living in 1928 in the house of his ancestors, begins to be fascinated by old documents and diaries he finds dealing with the romance of an earlier Peter Standish, who lived and loved in 1784...
...Still, the fact remains that in a production which obviously seeks dramatic illusion, she is unable fully to sustain her share...
...He is neither a singing actor nor an acting singer...
...Instead of resorting to the old trick of a dream, Mr...
...He is back in 1784, with a curious knowledge of future events, at once a historical figure and a man of today, talking of the people around him as if they were dead, yet feeling them emotionally as living...
...The play itself may not last throughout the season...
...In the Provincetown revival of a few years ago, Orpheus was assigned to Richard Hale...
...Helen must be left among the dead, although she, for her part, lives as much in an ideal of the future as Peter lives in conjured memories of the past...
...He uses his voice entirely for dramatic effect and his acting to heighten the poetry and power of his musical expression...
...They have- taken a gem from the past, and by giving it lovely expression, set new hope for the future...
...The dream is so satisfying and the reality so hard to bear...
...The grey-clad figures who stand watch, like the chorus of Greek tragedy, and breathe their words of consolation or terror or pity, recreate a lost element of beauty...
...This is indeed a slow sickness of the soul which we encounter every day in its milder forms...
...His is not one of the great operatic voices...
...Orpheus has seldom been given as an opera, although Gluck's enthralling score has often been rendered in concert form and with notable soloists...
...Impractical...
...He must remain there to commune with the past-actually, if possible, to relieve it...
...History has it that he marries Kate Petti-grew, but that part of him which is of today falls in love with Helen Pettigrew instead...
...Its quality is uneven...
...You can, if you wish, accept this play merely as the light and rather sad little phantasy it appears to be on the surface...
...In the last scene, Peter is back in the present, apparently returned to sanity after an anxious period during which he has failed to recognize even his fiancee...
...There are only three singing parts, and the role of Orpheus has been taken variously by tenors, baritones and such well-known contralto singers as Louise Homer in modern days and Viardot-Carcia in the last century...
...For all its apparent toying with the fanciful idea that a man can live in two periods of history at one time, and for all the whimsical comedy ensuing from such an idea, its root inspiration lies deeper, very close in fact to a well-recognized form of insanity which begins with preferring a dream world to living truths...
...Anne Elliott, as the voice of Eros, has a distressing tremolo and an unpleasing tone quality in which a concealed overtone seems to vibrate in dissonance with the essential note...
...He cannot marry...
...At times some of his notes are a trifle muffled...
...His artistry is a unit...
...Yet he is an artist-not merely an artistic singer, but an artist in the fullest sense of the word, gifted with an inner flame that spreads warmth and intensity and spiritual force to his every gesture and intonation...
...These minor tragedies are the hidden terrors of mankind...
...It becomes a romance of foreordained frustration...
...In the matter of dramatic technique, Berkeley Square is compounded with unusual skill...
...There is complete integrity in his attack and there is poetry, not only in his understanding, but in all that he can make his audience understand and feel...
...It is the balance which makes daily life endurable and provides that calm judgment which we call maturity...
...The Provincetowners have cut away the pretentious trappings and, by selecting an opera of almost perfect proportions, have brought back its full possibilities as a method of uniting poetry, drama, music and the dance...
...Unwillingly he must return to the present...
...The Provincetown revival has the advantage of being on a small scale in a small theatre...
...The date of the original production is 1762, and the place Vienna...
...The struggle is too great, and nine times out of ten one is content to sit back and, with closed eyes, to drink in the notes of the famous singer...
...But it is a play built essentially upon withdrawal from realities and upon an effort to escape into the limitless realm of fancy-not, please note, in the sense of harmless phantasy, but rather in the pathological sense...
...A conflict arises between the wish and the truth...
...So far as we know, America first heard it in 1863...
...The opera house itself becomes a vast and ornate barn...
...This prevents the loss of the poetry and drama which are so apt to occur on the great spaces of the Metropolitan Opera stage...
...He ends by losing his job...
...To meet that salary, huge audiences are demanded at high prices...
...It does not matter whether this was the author's intention or not...
...His superb rendition of the difficult and sustained music brought the highest praise, and it was again Hale who appeared in last week's revival...
...But the mental link with the past has now become unbreakable...
...It is written with great distinction, and acted with a delicious sense of comedy in certain scenes and exquisite tenderness in others...
...This ability to give inner understanding a full outer expression is, after all, nothing more nor less than that perfection of balance between idea and reality which, in everyday life, we call fine adjustment, and which, in art, we set as the ultimate goal of achievement...
...True art, seeking the chance to create aesthetic enjoyment, goes abegging in carpeted aisles...
...It is the balance which made Greek sculpture supreme...
Vol. 11 • November 1929 • No. 3
