DELIRIOUS DRAMA

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 6494, 14 April 1908, Page 7

DELIRIOUS DRAMA

(From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, February 20. Thor© is in London just now a company of Sicilian player® who 'have taken the town by storm. They cam© unheralded and unknown, T/dr alter the first performance they were the talk of the town, and ever since the Shaftesbury Theatre has drawn packed houses. "hMve you seen the Sicilians ?" is now a stock conversational opening, njid not to have seen them is to be ffcfctTeilly behind, the times in London. Their acting 1 has keen a sensational surprise, for it is quite unlike anything that English audiences have been accustomed to. It is a perfect delirium of emotion. Everything is done on the top note of passion. Love becomes a frenzy, tears a wild torrent of weeping, jealousy a furious, raging madness. And as the plays all deal with these elemental passions, love and jealousy, fear, sorrow, and remorse, the emotional intensity dT the performance is simply amazing. There is practically no idea of restraint, such as the English ®tage habitually inculcates. Those Sicilians in their pourtrayal of peasant tragedies of the passionate South are children of Nature, with their emotions all on the surface, ready to burst forth In torrential flood at a moment's notice. They play in Italian, but an English audience has no difficulty in following the story, for the acting is vividly realistic. To sit through one of the performances is a thrilling experience, and for most of us an absolutely novel experience. Two of the players, M, Grasso and Mimi Aguglia, are artists pf quite remarkable power and ability, and they provided some memorable scenes. By way of illustration one cannot do better than quote fiom the "Daiky Telegraph's” description of their acting in D'Annunzio's pastoral tragedy, “The Daughter of .Torio"; — "There was a moment at the end of the second act of 'La Figlia di Jorio' when Madame Mimi Aguglia held us in tho hollow of her thin, lithe, eloquent hands. She is beset by fears of the wicked old Lazzaro, and she pants, writhes, screams a sort of stifled sob, breathes heavily through her nostrils, squints, and even squeals in her panic terror. Then in her wild flight across the stage she is seized by Lazzaro, and she struggles in his arms ' like a mad, hunted, despairing wild animal, until her lover. Aligio. rushes in—arid in a second the crisis has come. Seizing an axe, Aligio dial® a furious blow at tho assailant and lays him prostrate on the ground. Alas, Lazzaro is his father, and he is a parricide! The whole tragedy passes in a blinding flash of passion and wrath and murderous vengeance. The heroin© lies senseless, the hero is on his knees, jabbering terrified prayers to the Virgin; tho body of the murdered man remains as tho testimony and witness to the deed of blood. The crisis lasted perhaps three minutes, and in those three minutes were packed the crnollist elements of an appalling tragedy, the heart-shaking emotions of furious, insane, tortured, fate-driven animals."

That is a sample of the way in which the Sicilians play. Mimi Aguglia docs not act her part; she lives it. “When I cry," she says, "I shed real tears. When my hehrt is wrung, it really is aching. W© people of Sicily are like that. W© feel things we see, we arc carried away by our emotions. We have not learned repression. Wo arc not ashamed of the great, primal, human, emotions."