Drama -- History and criticism; Theater; Theater -- History
The special merit of this production of 'Sister Beatrice' lay in the
delicate art by which more was suggested than could well be shown. In
the theater, more often than not, the half is greater than the whole,
and what is unseen is frequently more powerful than what is made
visible. In Mr. Belasco's 'Darling of the Gods,' a singularly beautiful
spectacle, touched at times with a pathetic poetry, the defeated
samurais are at last reduced to commit hara-kiri. But we were not made
spectators of these several self-murders; we were permitted to behold
only the dim cane-brake into which these brave men had withdrawn, and to
overhear each of them call out his farewell greetings to his friends
before he dealt himself the deadly thrust. If we had been made witnesses
of this accumulated self-slaughter we might have been revolted by the
brutality of it. Transmitted to us out of a vague distance by a few
scattered cries, it moved us like the inevitable close of a truly tragic
tale.
In the 'Aiglon' of M. Rostand, Napoleon's feeble son finds himself alone
with an old soldier of his father's on the battle-field of Wagram; and
in the darkness of the night, and in the turmoil of a wind-storm the
hysteric lad almost persuades himself that he is actually present at the
famous fight, that he can hear the shrieks of the wounded, and the
groans of the dying, and that he can see the hands and arms of the dead
stretched up from the ground. This is all in the sickly boy's fancy, of
course, and yet in Paris the author had voices heard, and caused hands
and arms to be extended upward from the edge of the back drop, thus
vulgarizing his own imaginative episode by the presentation of a
concrete reality. Not quite so inartistic as this, and yet frankly
freakish was the arrangement of the closet scene between Hamlet and his
mother, when Sarah-Bernhardt made her misguided effort to impersonate
the Prince of Denmark. On the walls of the room where Hamlet talks
daggers to the queen there were full-length, life-sized portraits of her
two successive husbands, and when Hamlet bids her look on this picture,
and on this, the portrait of Hamlet's father became transparent, and in
its frame the spectators suddenly perceived the ghost. This is an
admirable example of misplaced cleverness, of the search for novelty for
its own sake, of the sacrifice of the totality of impression to a mere
trick.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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