As regards the acting, the two things the Greeks valued most in actors
were grace of gesture and music of voice. Indeed, to gain these virtues
their actors used to subject themselves to a regular course of gymnastics
and a particular regime of diet, health being to the Greeks not merely a
quality of art, but a condition of its production. Whether or not our
English actors hold the same view may be doubted; but Mr. Vezin certainly
has always recognised the importance of a physical as well as of an
intellectual training for the stage, and his performance of King Priam
was distinguished by stately dignity and most musical enunciation. With
Mr. Vezin, grace of gesture is an unconscious result--not a conscious
effort. It has become nature, because it was once art. Mr. Beerbohm
Tree also is deserving of very high praise for his Paris. Ease and
elegance characterised every movement he made, and his voice was
extremely effective. Mr. Tree is the perfect Proteus of actors. He can
wear the dress of any century and the appearance of any age, and has a
marvellous capacity of absorbing his personality into the character he is
creating. To have method without mannerism is given only to a few, but
among the few is Mr. Tree. Miss Alma Murray does not possess the
physique requisite for our conception of Helen, but the beauty of her
movements and the extremely sympathetic quality of her voice gave an
indefinable charm to her performance. Mrs. Jopling looked like a poem
from the Pantheon, and indeed the personae mutae were not the least
effective figures in the play. Hecuba was hardly a success. In acting,
the impression of sincerity is conveyed by tone, not by mere volume of
voice, and whatever influence emotion has on utterance it is certainly
not in the direction of false emphasis. Mrs. Beerbohm Tree's OEnone was
much better, and had some fine moments of passion; but the harsh
realistic shriek with which the nymph flung herself from the battlements,
however effective it might have been in a comedy of Sardou, or in one of
Mr. Burnand's farces, was quite out of place in the representation of a
Greek tragedy. The classical drama is an imaginative, poetic art, which
requires the grand style for its interpretation, and produces its effects
by the most ideal means. It is in the operas of Wagner, not in popular
melodrama, that any approximation to the Greek method can be found.
Better to wear mask and buskin than to mar by any modernity of expression
the calm majesty of Melpomene.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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