BERNHARDT AND DUSE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20069, 8 April 1927, Page 12

BERNHARDT AND DUSE.

The public saw always that Bernhardt was a stupendous event in human enterprises. She amazed, thrilled, defeated them; she dominated even if She bored them; she delighted, exalted, and made them shiver with ice on their spines. She established, apart from herself and the moment of life that she wrought to her stage purposes, a magnificent whole idea, a popular image, vastly entertaining and unforgettable, whatever else it might be, good or bad. Bernhardt had something mythical about her, like a volcano. People found in her something they could recognise, though they might not be able to moralise it. They could see in her a kind of sheer life principle which they could enjoy without being able to understand, something in her that the instinct of . life in them drove them toward as a magnificent example of what they sensed to be the springs of all our energy and imagination— I mean elemental power. With Duse there was no such thing. She could never have been an overpowering actress in the ordinary sense. She could not even have recited as Bernhardt was able to do, with any elaborate heroic distinction, and with any of that incomparable vocal spell that Bernhardt knew’ how to weave. Artists over Europe were drawn to her almost unendurable tenderness and truth; in Italy her audiences alternately worshipped and railed at her. With her there was the audacious and spectacular; nothing violent, seductive, or world-wide. Her glamour was of another sort.—Glamour; Young. Essays on the art of the Theatre.—Stark