“Praised be Allah.” “Hats off to Charlie Chaplin.” “THE SCAVANGER.” The Theatre “ROSMERSHOLM” (_The Chicago Little Theatre_) I don’t want to write about _Rosmersholm_ or about Ibsen now. I want to write about Mme. Borgny Hammer, who is great in the manner of the great Norwegians. There is a lot of talk about the Russian soul just at present. I wish the Norwegian soul might come in for its share of analysis and appreciation. It is interesting not because of its dark shudderings but because of its intense light and its clearness. It is like the sun; it is like wild flowers—not the delicate but the hardy ones. Mme. Hammer is this sort of person. She is an actress because she must act or die. She is so intense that the air about her is always “charged”; and she is so natural and simple that you know right away she must be great. There wasn’t a particle of difference between her presence on the stage as the Ibsen heroine and her manner when she meets you on Michigan Avenue and stops to say that Ibsen is so wonderful it’s impossible to cut a line of his dialogue. In both situations she is the genius. Mrs. Fiske’s Rebecca West was a stunningly-worked-out idea; Mme. Hammer’s was just—Rebecca West. Mrs. Fiske had a theory of the character and presented it in a series of subtle and powerful designs. But what did this wonderful woman do? She didn’t act Rebecca West at all: she just gave you the impression that she is Rebecca every day of her life. She made _Rosmersholm_ a natural scene in the life of some modern family, instead of making it a “study”—an effect in a rather strained psychology. I wish I could describe Mme. Hammer’s stage conversations—especially the parts where she listens. She is so busy feeling Rebecca West that she has no time to waste in managing her eyes and voice and hands. They take care of themselves just as they would in her own library. When our best actresses “listen” they keep their eyes on the person who is talking with the kind of look that says: “I know it would be bad art now to look at the audience out of the tail of my eye. I must pay close attention to what this actor is saying to me.” Mme. Hammer looks at Rosmer with the same expression she would wear if he were about to say things she hadn’t heard him rehearse every day for six weeks. If she should break out with some dialogue of her own it couldn’t sound any more spontaneous than her reading of the lines Ibsen gave to Rebecca. I know Rebecca’s lines, and yet I forgot them and decided she must be making things up as she went along. What richness of simplicity, and what a sturdy beauty!