In “La Rupture” Mme. Polaire played the part of a woman with a poor lover. She was very fond of him, but he was impecunious, and she was expensive and terribly jealous. So she listens to the suit of a disgusting old fossil, who is smitten with her charms. Her repulsion is displayed with startling realism, and it furnishes the cue to the lover, who darts out and stabs the old man in the back. He falls dead, and there is a panic-stricken scene between the lovers. The woman is terrified; the man is horror-stricken; the corpse lies before them. There is a dark green atmosphere, full of the hoarse whispers of the guilty couple, in recrimination and disgust. There is no end to “La Rupture.” It leaves off suddenly; the curtain falls. You spear a sensation, but it is half-fraudulent. Across the Channel, and to London. It seems healthier, even if it isn’t. At any rate, one feels more at home there. The American manager stalks through the English land, with his pocketbook in evidence, and his plans neatly newspapered. He is a bit lost in Paris, because he can’t produce the plays offered there without adapting them, and in the adaptation much is lost, and nothing takes its place. He sees a Parisian success, but the hero and heroine are never married. That is the stickler. A wedding ring would ruin them, and we have our little prejudice in favor of that magic circlet. The wedding ring may not be artistic--that is the Parisian answer to our plaints--but until we have discovered something that will aptly take its place, we prefer it. The American manager dare not fly in the face of the wedding ring, and that is why he shuffles about rather uneasily in Paris. Sometimes he takes his adapter with him to see these French plays. Even that is unsatisfactory. The adapter is human, and he wants some work to do-o-o. He scents “possibilities,” and he is not afraid to say so. But French plays are becoming more and more impossible for New York. An American audience will not stand talk, and a French audience enjoys it when it hovers around the one eternal theme. Then the French idea of ending happily differs so essentially from the American notion, which is indissolubly allied with the wedding ring. The merry peals of nuptial bells ring no music into French ears. The one attraction of the London season that has “attracted” is Mr. Alfred Sutro’s play at the Garrick Theater, called “The Walls of Jericho.” Mr. James K. Hackett, who has hitherto contented himself with being merely beautiful, in the rôles of fanciful and highly upholstered kings, and the daredevil idiots of cheap, book-tweaked “romance,” has secured the play for New York. Mr. Hackett will have to forego his gilt and plush adornments, the silken tights that he has worn so long and so lovingly. He will have to dress as a modern man, and to blazon forth the persistent and hackneyed criminality of that section of humanity known as “society.”