Playwrights on playmaking : $b and other studies of the stageMatthews, Brander
History
Playwrights on playmaking : $b and other studies of the stage
Matthews, Brander
Drama -- History and criticism; Theater
He was not a great actor, that I knew already, altho he was a
competent performer; but he had a charming personality, and when
he chanced to be cast for a character with which his personality
coincided, he was entirely satisfactory. Of course he appeared
to best advantage in Irish parts, The O’Grady in Boucicault’s
‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ and Off-lan-aghan in Lester Wallack’s ‘Veteran,’ and
above all Sir Lucius O’Trigger in Sheridan’s ‘Rivals.’ I doubt if Sir
Lucius has been more sympathetically impersonated by any performer of
the second half of the nineteenth century than it was by Brougham.
I have seen the character undertaken by W. J. Florence and by Nat
Goodwin, actors of a far more opulent equipment than Brougham, yet
neither of them succeeded so well in bringing out the gentlemanly
simplicity of this lovable character. Goodwin was too completely an
American of the nineteenth century to be able to assume the part of
an Irish gentleman of the eighteenth century; and Florence, excellent
as he was in Irish characters of another kind, bestowed on Sir Lucius
a rather finicky affectation, quite out of keeping with the part.
In those distant days the dramatist was sadly underpaid. Brougham
told me once that his price for writing a play for a star was three
thousand dollars, payable on delivery of the manuscript, a sum
smaller than a month’s royalty on a successful play of to-day. And
yet more than one of the vehicles Brougham put together for this
modest price, ran like the One Hoss Shay. The stage-version of the
‘Old Curiosity Shop,’ in which Lotta doubled Little Nell and the
Marchioness, must have been performed several hundred times; and only
less successful were other of the made-to-order pieces he composed
for Mr. and Mrs. Barney Williams and for Mr. and Mrs. Florence.
These last were congenial labor, since they dealt with Irish themes,
more or less in imitation of Boucicault’s more solidly built
‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ and ‘Colleen Bawn.’
Where Boucicault was dominating, not to say domineering, Brougham
was yielding and unambitious. Their early disagreement over the
authorship of ‘London Assurance’ did not prevent their professional
association in later years. When ‘Arrah-na-Pogue’ was revived in
1873 at Booth’s Theater, Brougham played The O’Grady, supporting
Boucicault as Shaun the Post and Mrs. Boucicault as Arrah. And when
Boucicault in 1879 was strangely ill-advised to undertake ‘Louis XI,’
in his own adaptation of the play which Casimir Delavigne had made
out of ‘Quentin Durward,’ Brougham was Coitier; and I can testify
that on this occasion the honors were divided, or at least the
laughs, for I never listened to any dialog more ludicrous than that
between a French king with a pronounced Irish accent and a French
physician with an equally persistent brogue. These, as Beau Brummel’s
valet explained, “these are our failures.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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