Plays, Acting and Music: A Book Of TheorySymons, Arthur
Philosophy
Plays, Acting and Music: A Book Of Theory
Symons, Arthur
Actors; Music -- History and criticism; Theater
The Santuzza of Mimi
Aguglia is a stinging thing that bites when it is stepped on. There is
no love in her heart, only love of possession, jealousy, an unreasonable
hate; and she is not truly pathetic or tragic in her furious wrestle
with her lover on the church steps or in her plot against him which
sends an unanticipated knife into his heart.
Yet, in the Mila di Codra of d'Annunzio's "Figlia di Jorio" she has
moments of absolute greatness. Her fear in the cave, before Lazaro di
Roio, is the most ghastly and accurate rendering of that sensation that,
I am sure, has been seen on any stage. She flings herself upright
against a frame of wood on which the woodcarver has left his tools, and
as one new shudder after another sets her body visibly quaking, some of
the tools drop on the floor, with an astonishing effect on the nerves.
Her face contracts into a staring, hopeless grimace, as if about to
utter shrieks which cannot get past her lips. She shivers slowly
downwards until she sinks on her rigid heels and clasps her knees with
both arms. There, in the corner, she waits in twenty several anguishes,
while the foul old man tempts her, crawling like a worm, nearer and
nearer to her on the ground, with gestures of appeal that she repels
time after time, with some shudder aside of her crouched body, hopping
as if on all fours closer into the corner. The scene is terrible in its
scarcely thinkable distress, but it is not horrible, as some would have
it to be. Here, with her means, this actress creates; it is no mean copy
of reality, but fear brought to a kind of greatness, so completely has
the whole being passed into its possession.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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