It is pleasant to record the impressions of a performance of this play at the Lessing Theatre, Berlin, September 30, 1904. Director Otto Brahm has long been a noted Ibsenite, his brochure familiar to all students of the Scandinavian master. Ibsen, in German, plays decidedly smoother, with more sonority and an abundance of the much-decried "atmosphere." The stage settings, as is usual at this artistic playhouse, were beautiful. Yet one felt the danger of transferring to the boards such an imaginative idea. In the hands of Agnes Sorma the difficult rôle of Ellida would not have suffered. Irene Triesch, despite her unequivocal sincerity, is not temperamentally suited to the part. A mermaid who is given to morbid reveries and a fierce buccaneer-like stranger hardly convince us in this miracle-hating age. Each time the sailor appeared with his big cloak and melodramatic hat I expected to hear the theme of the Flying Dutchman intoned by an invisible orchestra. The human half of the story is more credible. Boletta and Hilda are real flesh and blood, while the tutor Arnholm, impersonated by that excellent character-actor, Emmanuel Reicher, was as big a bore as Ibsen probably intended him to be. The Lady from the Sea is an attempt to capture a mood in which Maeterlinck might have been more successful. * * * * * XIII HEDDA GABLER (1890) Hedda Gabler is a great play, great despite its unpleasant theme, and also remarkable, inasmuch as its subject-matter is essentially undramatic--"the picture not of an action but of a condition," as Henry James puts it. The Norwegian poet usually begins to develop his drama where other writers end theirs. Yet so wonderful is his art that we are treated to no long explanations, no retrospective speeches; indeed, the text of an Ibsen play is little more than a series of memoranda for the players. Cuvier-like, the actor must reconstruct a living human from a mere bone of a word. These words seem detached, seem meaningless, yet in action their cohesiveness is unique; dialogue melts into dialogue, action is dovetailed to action, and fleeting gestures reveal a state of soul. Ibsen does not read as well as he acts. He is extremely difficult to interpret for the reason that the old technic of the actor is inadequate, as Bernard Shaw long ago declared.