DOES PUNCH FEEL?

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3054, 9 April 1881, Page 3

DOES PUNCH FEEL?

Br Eexby Ik vino,

The dramatic profession is the happy hunting-ground of a great many harmless hobbies, one of which is that an actor, to attain distinction in his art, must always remain emotionally oxitside the characters he portrays. He must never feel. This idea is not merely the crotchet of people who know, perhaps, very little of acting as an art, but it lias also received the sanction of certain eminent artists and critics. It is certainly a capital theory for those who don't feel. At the same time the experience of every actor —real actor, I mean—must be a law to himself in such matters. He may find that his soul is often stirred to its very depths by the passion of the sceno, not in the direct course of that indefinable power which wo call inspiration, but under the influence of circumstances not invented by the dramatist, and wholly unsuspected by tho audience. I cannot illustrate this better than by telling a story of Edmund Kean. It should be remembered that the style of our old actors was very much affected by their surroundings. They had no gas battens or friendly lime light to follow them aboutjthe stage, and settle fondly their brows when they wanted to make a telling point in facial display. Naturally, a grand declamatory style was much more suited to a badly lighted stage, than a manner full of artistio minlttue. This is what Hazlitt meant when he said, that to be really appreciated, Kean's acting should be seen from the front row in the pit, which was then next to the orchestra. So limited was the radius of light that it was tho great object of every player to get into what was called the " focus," so that his face might be clear to the audience. This also accounts for the habit, odd to us now, which actors had of constantly standing on the stage in a line.

One night Kean played the great scene in tbe third act of Othello with a power which astonished even his most devoted admirers. One of them, meeting him a day or two complimented him on his performance. "You were wonderful, the other night, Mr Kean." " Was I?" said the tragedian. " Why, didn't you feel that you were ?" " No. Can't say I remember anything particular." "Surely you must remember, Mr Kean ! On Thursday night when you seized Mr -by the throat, and got into such a fury, I thought you'd have killed him!" "Ha!" exclaimed Kean, brightening, "I remember now. Did I seem in a fury, eh ?" " Oh, awful, sir, awful!" "No wonder. D the fellow, he tried to keep me out of the focus!"

This incident will not, I hope, prompt some future Othello to get up a private row with lago'in order to lash himself into a frenzy. Another story of Kean's power of impressing the imagination was told to me by the late Mr W. A. Wills. Mr Wills was taken when a child to see Kean as Macbeth, and so great was the horror produced on his mind by the actor's face when he emerged from Duncan's chamber after the murder, that a feeling of nausea came over him, and he had to be taken out of the theatre. Years afterwards, when a youth of about seventeen, Mr Wills used to dine every day at the " Cider Cellars," in the Strand, in those times a highly respectable tavern, the proprietor of which was a friend of the young man's father. One afternoon, he was sitting down to his chop, when there entered a little man in a grey coat and Hessian boots, with piercing eyes and a beard of some day's growth. The stranger stood with his back to the fire, and fixed his gaza on the boy and the chop. Immediately the same feeling of sickness came over the lad which he had experienced that night at the theatre when looking at Kean, whom he had not seen since. He started in a fascinated way at the man, who stared at him, and was probably tickled by the thought that meanwhile the chop was getting coid. At last the youngster could endure it no longer; he rushed out of the room and sought the landlord's son.

" Who is that little man in the coffeeroom with his back to the fire ?" They came and peered at him through the door. "What ?" said the landlord's son, "don't you know who that is ? That's Edmund Kean."

T>ong before Kean's triumph' in London Mrs Jordan was " starring" (a common practice in the "palmy days") at a provincial theatre in The Wonder. " Who," said she, at rehearsal, "is to be my Don Felix ?" " That gentleman," said the managor, pointing to the shortest member of the company. " Oh, I can't act with him, he's too little !" The " little" actor gave her one look and walked away. Some years after, when all London was talking of Edmund Kean, Mrs Jordan, amongst othei'3, was anxious to be introduced to him. In the green-room at Drury Lane they met. " Great heavens 1" she exclaimed, " the little man with the eyes!" She said afterwards the eyes had haunted her—she had never forgotten their reproachful look.

All this goes to show, I Immbly imagine, that a player who may have an intense capacity of feeling and a corresponding power of expression is likely to be all the more vividly remembered by his contemporaries. When Kean frightened little Wills in Macbeth, the remembrance of some incident, quite apart from tho play, may have stimulated him to an unusual effort; and probably there is no nervous, highlystrung nature, which is not sensible of being stirred to action by influences equally indirect and unforseen. How strongly the association of ideas affects an actor may be illustrated by an experience which Macready wrote in his diary. He felt, he says, that on one occasion he played Virginius with moi'e effect than he had ever made before, and as he never thought he could have portrayed it ; and the explanation of his remarkable acting on that certain night is, that throughout the play he was thinking of his dead daughter whom he had buried only a few days before. —Era Almanac.