OBITUARY

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6946, 27 June 1929, Page 8

OBITUARY

DION BOUCICAULT. Australian Press Association. LONDON, June 25. The death is announced of Dion Boucicault, the actor, at the ago of 70. Mr. Boucicault was born in Now York, and first appeared on tho stage in IS if, i:: the city where he was born. A STANDARD-BEARER GONE. At a time when the legitimate stage (comedy and drama) is lighting with its back to the wail, when D. W. Griffith says that it will be killed by the talking movies within live years, and when London cablegrams allege that some well-known British producers are preparing for their own funerals, it is of double significance that the death is announced of the veteran actor-man-ager-producer, Dion Boucicault, who, with his wife, Irene Vanbrugh, represented in this quarter of the world the legitimate s-tage’s highest and best, says a reviewer in the Post. Putting on one side those actors who have devoted themselves to the immortal Shakespeare, performing financial jugglery in order that he may be not only read but seen, it may be said that i o greater work has been done in the cause of comedy and drama in Australia and New Zealand than tha„ which has been associated, in two centuries, with the name of Boucicault. The so an (in years) of the record, and the variety of the artistic importance, are amazing, as even a glance at the list of plays, and their chronology, will show. Bo those who assembled to sec the revival of “Mr. Pirn,” realise that the masterly actor who played the quaint old man, was himself a septuagenarian, although his diction and the carrying power of his voice would shame many a younger actor? Do they realise that Miss Irene Vanbrugh—whose diction and acting are equally a model far above the. level of her rapidtalking, word-clipping young contemporaries—w as playing in Australia only four years later than the dobut of her (future) husband, for she was there with John L. Toole -in ISB9-1890? Thus both these standard-bearers of the legitimate stag-c are links with the Antipodes of the ’eighties, when the stage was indeed an educational force, and when art and culture, instead of spectacle and leg-play, were the means by which theatres were filled. How far Australia and Now Zealand have travelled since those infantile Victorian days the new generation, in a new atmosphere, cannot picture, yet it sees even this year the Boueicault-Vanbrugh art—modernised but not cheapened—still standing out conspicuous as a high water mark upon the receding tide. In the late Dion Boucicault (who first trod the boards in Now York in 1579, fifty years ago) we remember the Irish plays of his actor-playwright FrenchIrish father (it was in 1885 that Dion first appeared with his father and sister Nina in Melbourne in “The Sbaughrauu” and other of the father’s plays); the Pinero, Jones, Grundy, Byron, and other comedies and dramas that were exquisitely interpreted to New Zealanders and Australians in that great decade, 18S(i-1896, “when a play was a play,” and when B. and B. (Brough and Boucicault) gave to these young countries tlie best work that contemporary art had to give; and lastly, the Twentieth Century seasons that Boucicault and Irene Vanbrugh provided, and of which wc shall not look upon the like again. When the history of the legitimate stage in Australia during the last half-century (which is also its last half-century according to Griffith) is written up adequately, the historian will at last do justice to that B. and B. decade that produced, for no great reward (monetary), over a hundred plays from “The Second Mrs Tanqueray” to “Fedora.” The huge amount of work involved, the short seasons, quick changes, etc., constituted a colossal task, which (as the late Robert Brough’s widow told the Australian Institute of Journalists in 1923) could only have been faced by overflowing youth with its heart in its work. And now the principal remaining link is snapped. Peace with honour!