"SWEET NELL OF OLD DRURY."

New Zealand Herald, Volume XL, Issue 12278, 23 May 1903, Page 1 (Supplement)

"SWEET NELL OF OLD DRURY."

[by tohcnga.J

Why is a play popular or a book? Why does one be-starred company have to change its pieces every other night, while another can keep a single attraction going for weeks, in the same town, and pack houses every time it opens the doors? Why does one plot with a seeming moral leave a bad taste in the mouth of playgoer or book-reader while another plot without any apparent moral and even of doubtful construction gives no offence? To solve these riddles of the Sphynx is the work that makes early grey the hair of authors, managers, publishers, and playactors; the chance that it may be accidentally solved is the lucky cast that makes the fortunes of the successful in the popular arts.

Before us in Auckland we have had such a lucky play, which night after night and week after week has drawn thousands to His Majesty's Theatre, and might apparently run on indefinitely with no cessation of popularity. It does not apparently make any concessions to our ethical and conventional prejudices. It relates to the worst period in English history, and presents to us some of the most notorious and infamous characters of that period. And its heroine is that Nell Gwynne, of whom most of us know through the'story that Parson Ken, honest churchman, refused to let her cross his threshold, and thereby won the mitre that was to the fore when the Seven Bishops raised a long-suffering nation against the Stuarts. " Give it to the little man who wouldn't give poor Nell a night's lodging," quoth Charles the Second of the next vacant bishopric. In which speech is the kernel of much thought. Thought One: That even Charles could not have been as bad at heart as he is usually painted, but preferred to have men around him who were not afraid to speak their minds or to stand against him for honest and decent living. Thought Two: That even Nell Gwynne was not as bad at heart as the scarlet sisterhood with whom she dwelt in kingly palaces, but was loyalhearted enough to know the truth, and noble-minded enough to forgive the blunt telling of it. Thought Three: That behind the relations of Charles and his " poor Nell" was something more than wantonness, that tenderness rare to the worst of the Stuarts mingled with his thoughts of her, and that her influence brought out all that was highest and noblest and most kingly in him. And so,_ you can think along! Until you may arrive at a conclusion which makes " Sweet Nell of Old Drury" true deduction from that little anecdote in which the , magical instinct of the common folk has embalmed the memory of the orange girl. But this is the esoteric side of the play. The exoteric is that an orange-seller hopelessly loves a banished lord, whose ruin the villainous chief justice has sworn, and who himself loves the chief justice's wealthy Ward. The orange-seller, by catching the fancy of the king, gets on to the Old Drury boards, and by her genius becomes a great actress. She devotes herself to protecting the man she secretly loves, using her wit, her talents and her influence as the king's mistress to win justice for him. In the end Jeffry is exposed, the lord is wedded to the heiress, and Charles banishes the envious and plotting " ladies" who have conspired against Sweet Nell. Here we have the seamy side of the Restoration shown to us. The infamous Castlemaiues and Portlands who fluttered away England's navy with their fans, and ogled the Dutch into the Thames; the black judge who baited trembling women in the blood-stained West, and died of sheer fright in the end as was most just and fitting; the sickly rakes who made all good men long for an hour of Cromwell; these gravitate around a monarch who would have been at home in the Yildiz Kiosk. More than easy it would have been to have made of such subjects the puppets of meretriciousness, to have run so very near to the wind that the audience would have instinctively clutched its chairarms for fear of the play over-toppling the allowable, and would have come away with the conviction that the young person ought to be prohibited'the up-to-date play. It was hard to make from such material a drama which is not only exciting but acceptable. That this has been done is a triumph of the player, working with consummate art to the intent and meaning of the dramatist. The run of "Sweet Nell of Old Drury" is more than a proof of what dramatists and players lan do when they know enough and like. It is the most trenchant criticism made for years upon the folly, the imbecility, and the superficiality of the so-called " modern" play and the " fashionable" actress.

In " Sweet Nell" situations and personages of whom the orderly world usually speaks, in camera are boldly taken for granted, and are used as the background— what ? There is the whole point. For courage against cowardice; for truth against lying ; for loyalty against time-serving ; for wit against malice ; for blind and unreasonable and hopeless love—faithful unto death and rising supremely above selfishness against ferocious and relentless and insatiable hate. And more than this! These worthless women, these contemptible men, this wretched king, this queen of wit and beauty and despair, this demoniac judge, pomp, power, the lusts of the eye and the pride of life, are all as nothing beside the true and honourable love of man and maid. The banished lord risks his life to see his sweetheart—and nobody laughs at him. It is taken for granted that the affection of an honest woman is worth more than life. The banished lord is unconscious of " Sweet Nell's" charms. It is taken for granted that the true lover of one woman gives no thought to another. Wicked judge and vicious king, Wynnes and Castlemaines and Rochesters, all acknowledge, each in his own way, the worth of courageous and devoted affection. If Nell is infamous the sell-evident fact is never protruded. Whatever she may be, she is only projected into the play as an unhappy woman, hiding ? broken, heart under a merry face, walking with kings and talking with judges in the innate equality of her whom the fairies have endowed with all good gifts, save one. But the " modern" play! Where wantonness and inuendo colour every act, where good is sneered at by married women and youthful ideals held up to every mock and gibe. It is like the " modern" book, where the pretence ot morality is excuse for unveiling all the mysteries, where one befogs between what is and what is not permissible in decent society. Over and over again plays are staged which are as unwholesome as some of the books openly displayed on the shelves of church members, yet because they have the semblance of respectability nothing is said. In " Sweet Nell" there is no pre,; tence of respectability, but from the rise of the curtain until its fall there is no double entendre, no inuendo, no treatment of the inevitable to which the most scrupulous could object. Of course " Sweet Nell" has Miss Stewart to interpret her, an arrangement most advantageous for the older Ellen. Possibly this is the difficulty. The characters of a "modern" play can be satisfactorily rendered by almost any good-looking woman, with a pleasant voice and trim ankles, who has graduated in ""the casual mannerisms of the day, and has acquired the art of knowing just how high the audience thinks she may kick. But an artistic creation—and surely " Sweet Nell" is a creation — a player to play it, to clothe with flesh and blood the impalpable imagining of an artist' fancy. That is the playactor's business. Any true player would have made of " Sweet Nell" a character to be remembered, so that there is nothing particularly remarkable in Miss Stewart s success. For while the fashionable actress comes and goes, depending for her vogue on the colour of her hair or the way she swings her skirts, the born player once found is with us always, and for such as them, and only them, the born dramatists write. Miss Stewart, like that still other Ellen— Terryand like all the great player-, is not herself on the boards. She becomes the character she represents. So that one never thinks of the player but only of the play when the past is made to live, and the dead to breathe and speak, by the genius that interprets the ' genius that conceives.