A VANISHED ART

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 21, 25 January 1936, Page 13

A VANISHED ART

THE THEATRICAL

POSTER

WHEN VILLAINS WERE VILE

Beyond the Gothic windows green moonlight falls with an unearthly light on a wild sea. Out of the waves rise two rocky promontories with, on their craggy heights, two. castles of incredible ancientness bathed in the same unholy radiance, says a writer in the "Cape Times."

The room whose arches casements open out upon this romantic scene is of a startling contrast, for it is hung with richest ruby red lit only by the glow of a dying fire. In the corner on a handsome settee reclines what appears in the dim light to be an old gentleman in a chin beard and a Balaclava helmet (but perhaps he is_ the young hero and the chin beard is in reality Piccadilly weepers of the most modish cut).

At any rate, there he lies, his eyes closed and his head reclining on a well-kept hand.

But the strangest of all in this far from ordinary interior is a wild-look-ing figure in trunk hose and a dark purple ruff who may be observed stepping out of a large picture frame behind the sleeper. He is of heavy build and remarkably solid looking, but he balances on the back of a small cane chair without any apparent difficulty. The whites of his eyes glare horribly and with a phosphorescent finger he points at the Balaclava helmet. INTRIGUING SCENE. It is an intriguing scene you'll admit, and it wafted me away into a world of fantasy and melodrama far from the grey museum precincts and the grey fog outside. It is part of a theatrical poster advertising "The Ghost Scene" in "The Family Legend" to be "shown by special request for a limited number of performances only" and is one of a collection exhibited in London. Ladies in spreading crinolines (for it is dated 1865) must have clutched the arms of their escorts with little hands in delicate lavender kid gloves and given little squeals of coquettish alarm when the ghost stepped from his frame: and children in long pantaloons stored up material for many nightmares. I wonder if the theatre would be in such a parlous state if we had a few more posters like that nowadays; for there is no doubt about it they do stir the imagination and make one long to sea the play itself. "A Day Will Come" is the title of another absorbing masterpiece, in which a beautiful girl with masses of auburn hair appears to be drowning in a mill pond. Her plentiful tresses are spread out on the surface of the water, each wave and curl looking its very best. Water doesn't seem to affect the heroines of melodrama in the same way as the ordinary woman. Here there Is none of the wretched drowned rat appearance that you or I would have if we happened to be drowning in a mill pond, but a very perfection of loveliness. A young man with starting eyes of alarm pokes his head through a window on the first storey of the millhouse, while from a window on the top storey a serving-man hangs out, and with great presence of mind rings a bell on the roof. '•■'■" THE VILLAIN. In the left-hand corner is a figure that the least deductive mind will recognise at once as-the villain. He is slinking away behind a willow tree. He wears, of course, the correct attire for villains: a black top hat and tailcoat, and he adds to that a garment that only the richest arid most unscrupulous villains can afford,,a black overcoat with a tight waist and very, very curly black astrakhan collar and cuffs. He looks backward at us over his shoulder with a coiling black eye. His sable whiskers are the very essence of sinfulness.

This symbolic attire for villains is again seen in an Edwardian poster for a play called "The Sorrows of Satan." Here a similarly clothed gentleman, with even wickeder black mustachios and a very sinister upward twist to the corners of his eyebrows (obviously this time not only a villain but the Devil himself) clutches a shrinking lady in a hobble-skirted evening dress by the arm and hisses (I'm sure he somehow managed to hiss it) "and will you love me AFTER death?" And it is seen again on a dark person (villains were always dark) who peers through the window at a large company of Edwardian ladies and gentlemen (somehow one can't think of them as anything so coarse as "men and women"), who look on in various attitudes of amazement and alarmsome of the ladies are even fainting— ■ while a female figure in a large purple feather boa kneels on a Turkey carpet and clasps a little girl to her bosom in what is palpably a maternal frenzy. But the star turn here is. a beautiful tall willowy policeman in a large poetical fair beard, who starts forward in a graceful bend, and, with arms outstretched towards the purple boa, exclaims, "Go, and sin no more!"

What fun they had in the theatre in those days! What thrills! There must have been something very comforting about those old dramas: where villains were always dark and heroines always fair, where right and wrong were so easily recognisable, where nobody doubted that chastity was the brightest jewel in a woman's crown and virtue was always triumphant. The theatre was regarded by many people then as one of the snares of Satan, but in reality it must have been a kind of moral pick-me-up. A HEAVY HAND. Pathos and humour .were both laid on with a trowel. Little Eva dies pathetically in a large white bed, while sobbing negroes pray around, and the family doctor stands by, for some reason, with an immense watch in his hands, at which he stares fixedly. "Yes, mother, I come, I come," exclaims the child in the "East Lynne" poster, starting up from his pillow with eyes turned to the ceiling. "Dead, and he never nailed me 'Mother,'" wails in a bubble, the figures in yards of crepe who kneels at the foot of the bed.

It must have been glorious fun. And for those who liked "a good cry" the satisfaction must have been more than words can say.

There are plenty of posters for pantomimes, delicious things covered with Victorian fairies in very tight waists, with very large eyes, , harlequins and columbines. Punch and Judy, geese and frogs, clowns and policemen. There are posters for circuses with wildly galloping stallions, tigers and elephants, and "Cupid in the Soot-Bag executed on a single Horse at Full Speed." In an enormous arena (I think it was the Crystal Palace) hundreds of Victorian ladies and gentlemen sit at hundreds of little tables eating and drinking, while hundreds of acrobats swing in the air above them on trabezes. hang nonchalantly in corners by their teeth, or stroll about upside down on the ceiling. All in vain, however, are these antics if by them they hope to attract attention. Not a single one of the diners thinks it worth while to cast a glance upwards in their direction!

Amone the more modern posters the Gaiety Girl trips down the stage in a Dana Gibson gown and the sauciest of black ooenwork stockings. Martin Harvey, in "The Only .Way" proclaims

beside the scaffold: "It is a far, far better thing"; and there are many excellent ones for Sir Nigel Playfair's productions. But to my mind they lack the conviction of the older advertisements, whose great appeal is that they stimulate the imagination so that you feel you would give anything to see the play, and that, after all, should be the main ambition of a theatrical poster.