The Actors' Alley. OUT OF WORK—UTILITY—UNDER

Otago Witness, Issue 2355, 13 April 1899, Page 60

The Actors' Alley. OUT OF WORK— UTILITY— UNDER-

STUDY.

"I often shed tears in the motley" Strand," wrote Charles Lamb, " from fulness of joy at so much Jife." Would he feel that joyous emotion if he could see the Strand now? It is more " motley " than ever, and in a professional sense that Lamb could not have had in his mind. Here tho actors walk, the unemployed actors with 20 years' training. Near a door which leads to refreshments you see one long, clean-shaver, face in weary colloquy with another. You need not hear the words : the mournful gaze of each over the other's shoulder (have you ever noticed that two people with a common woe never look in each other's eyes?) tell the tal6 of many worthy tellow3 that are out of engagements, thi.i pnii being the two most deserving. In Lamb's days the players were very few, and they could not have trooped up and down the Strand in this disconsolate fashion. What

"fulnes3 of joy" could spring in hia heart now if he saw a careworn " utility man,' 1 with round shoulders and a shabby coat, trying to whip up a " wheeze " for the diversion of a trio of damsels, who explain to him with filial intimacy that they are " walking on " at the theatre where his talents are unknown? Perhaps. Lamb would bo taken with the tall young woman who walkp Haughtily by heedless of giggles from the little group. She has just risen from the ranks to the dignity of " understudy," and carries her part in her hand in a brown-paper cover (tho Strand is littered with these brown-paper covers) , which is n, proof of rank and station, like marriage 'lines." And every day the "understudy walks the same way with the same part, and speaksnevei a word of it, for the actress who plays it refuses to havo that trifling ailment which would take her gently from the scene ! "So much life !" Lamb might wonder now why the two old churches, stemming a tide that grows ever more profane and hideous, do not drop their coping stones on these myriad heade. He was not a squeamish man. " Streets, fctreets, streets " were his dolicht, and a dirty alley was a flower. to him. But the Strand is becoming an alley in which you cannot breathe, in which the music hall mob and the eating-house mob and those melancholy actors with the long blue faces and .the 20 years' training that interests neither mana--ger nor public, and the mad throng of vehicles of the largest size tyre turning the " fulne3S of joy " to the grip of suffocation. — Speaker.