AT A PARISIAN THEATRE

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1509, 31 January 1901, Page 54

AT A PARISIAN THEATRE

(From “M.A.P.”)

THE PORTE ST. MARTIN.

I say all this by way of preface to another and a different experience'. You have all heard of the Porte St. Martin theatre —that home sacred to melodrama which has played the same part in the theatrical life of Paris that your Adelphi plays in that of London. In a theatre situated in a popular quarter and entirely dependent on the public for its success, you do not expect the comfort you have a right to expect in a theatre like the Odeon, which has a large subsidy from the State, and, of course, you won't get it. But even in a popular theatre there are things which strike the British visitor as droll. The play was “L'Assommoir w —a tremendously successful revival of Zola’s famous work. It will be remembered that one of the most famous scenes in that play is the fight between Gervaise—the heroine—and Virginie, the she-villain of the story, in the laundry. In that scene a good deal of water and suds is thrown by the leading characters at each other; and in'preparation for this, a strange portent appeared before the footlights. It was one of the workmen of the house. Never aid a workman more frankly disown any attempt at keeping up the illusions of the stage. He was in his shirt-sleeves, and he proceeded to put before the footlights a number of little bits of rag—so they appeared to me—destined to protect the lights from Hie water. The frankness, simplicity, straightforwardness of the whole thing, this workman in his shirt-sleeves, these hits of rag, struck me as peculiarly French. Such a thing would be impossible in an English theatre without provoking outbursts of laughter and storms of catcalls. In the Forte St. Martin nobody took the least notice. It almost brought one back to the simplicity of that German mystery' play in wh'ch the curtain rose on Adam waiting patiently to be created.

THE PLAY. v <f l/Assommoir” —as I have said—is a tremendous hit • the house is crowded every night. It is vulgarly realistic, aind yet no critic dares to suggest that ihere is anything in the play which has not a right to be presented on the stage. It shows how far we have travelled in stage effects since the days when “L,Assommoir” was first produced. I read one of the critiques written at that period by M. Vitu, one of the sanest of French dramatic critics; and it was curious to see the horror with which the ordinary French writer then regarded the reproduction on the stage of anything like the vulgar realities of life. The idea of asking people to see men who drank to excess, women who fought like hyenas, the agony of vice and delirium tremens, and all such things were regarded by the ordinary French writer with a horror which appears like childish simplicity to us in these tough, realistic days. Anyhow, the Paris audience of to-day .finds it all quite natural, and intensely and thrillingly interesting. NO SCANDAL. * Let me at once say that the play bwes ita success* to no such appeal to pornographic taste as might have been expected. As everyone who has read Zola's book knows, the scene between the Hval women in the laundry has a terrible ending in which Gervaise inflicts chastisement on her enemy after .xt primatively savage and indecorous fashion. I daresay a good many prurient spectators looked forward 1 to this scene with delighted expectation. As a' matter of fact, no such scene takes plqce.- ’ It is suggested; and, indeed, it is intended that the audience should suppose that Gervaise has inflicted on Virginie that last insult which makes Gervaise dies of hunger, and Coupeau, her husband, dies of drink. But when the moment for this attack comes, a crowd gathers round the twoi combatants ; they are hidden from the audience, and, in short, all the proprieties are observed, and the audience is left to fill up the blanks with their imagination. - * A HEAT, WORK OF AllT. x<> No, owes its success to its fine construction ; to its clear , and hold delineation of character, and to its splendid acting. The hero of the artistic hour in Paris is Guitry. He was chosen by Sarah to represent a gruff old Napoleonic grenadier in ‘Tj Aiglon/* and, to the surprise of everybody, his part became almost the chief part of the play. In “L'Assommoir” he is, of course, Coupeau, the part which young Charles Warner has, madoiso familiar to hundreds of thousands of English playgoers. It is a wonderful-bit of acting The French workman stands before you

to the very life—roughish and yet refined ; awkward and yet self possessed; hard-working, decent, a good husband, an idolising and delightful father —until weakness and disease and bad company destroy him and turn him into a madman.

I have rarely seen a bit of acting more tender and delightful and life-like than the courtship between Goupeau and Gervaise before she finally consents to become his wife. The mixture of shyness and self-confidence for no Frenchman can ever be wholly shy, especially when making: love—the vulgarity and! yet the inner refinement of the scene as' Guitry does it —is wonderful. There is a banquet scene, too, in which more than a dozen people have to take part. I have been at many banquets, and there is nothing in them left for me to learn • and I claim, therefore, to> be something of a judge of what a banqqet is like—from the soberly sober to the hilariously elevated. One was almost seated at a popular festivity in real life as one watched these actors and actresses, each taking their part with the same readiness, simplicity, and truth to life. It was wondrously real.

And then came that tremendous series of scenes, in which Coupeau fights against drink, and resists and! yields, and becomes "mad and dies. It appalling in its realism. And yet there was a curious fact about it; it is a feature which distinguishes everything I have seen of the French stage. That is the wondrous self-restraint and moderation of the acting. Before one begins to understand either the French or any Other foreign nation, one has to get rid of a whole- lot of pre-conceived notions. One of my most settled notions about the. French before I came to know and understand them, was that they tore their passion to tatters. The love of gesture, the shrillness of voice, the desire to put things dramatically, appeared to me so essentially a part of their daily lives, that I expected to find all expression of deep and tragic emotion on the stage vehement almost to exaggeration. FRENCH SELF-RESTRAINT. Of such exaggeration you see nothing on the French stage, at least, wherever I have seen it. You remember that touching passage in which Coupeau tells to Gervaise, after his return from the hospital, of what he has suffered, of his visions and 1 - despair and agony. That whole- passage, heartbreaking in the intensity and very agony of its picture of self-inflicted humiliation and ruin, was delivered by Guitry in soft, low tones; and when he came to a point when he could no longer go- on, and tears choked his voice, there was just a slight pause -—a tiny "little catch in the voice, no shouted blubbering—and the bystanders acted in quite the same moderate and modest fashion. “Il pleure” (he weeps), cries Gervaise, in a. low, startled tone, and then she turns her head aside and weeps too, but silently, as people do in real life, where sorrow as a rule speaks not in the voice of the tempest, but in abashed whispers.

THE AUDIENCE. To complete picture of this evening at the Porte St. Martin, let me say just a word or two about the audience. It was to me quite as remarkable, as interesting, as dramatic a sight as the play itself; more so, indeed, as it was reality, not “a dream, of passion.” When the closing! scene of the play came, the audience grew strangely and almost terribly, still. They stood up from their

comfortless seats m the galleries, and leaned and hung on every word as though it were too sacred to be lost. Once or twice some person, unable . further to withstand the agonies of discomfort through which he was going, uttered a sound; at once he was glared at as though he were committing high treason. Attention so strained, so intense I have never seen. It was at once a triumph for the great actor who had produced such a state of feeling, for the audience who were capable of revealing it.

Dull, dingy, dusty —almost squalid—hideously uncomfortable, naif simplicity—witness that vision of the pror perty man in his shirt-sleeves—such is the Porte St. Martin as it looks materially. But with those marvellous artists on the stage, and with that equally marvellous audience, it was symptomatic of many thino-s In France. It is a people, after all, that—amid its economy carried to parsimony, its indifference to the solid comfort of life, its terrible respect for wealth, and its ghastly horror of poverty—lives most of its life in its ideals and its emotions.