REBELLIOUS ACTORS

Taranaki Daily News, 16 January 1935, Page 3

REBELLIOUS ACTORS

YEARS OF SOCIAL SCORN EFFECT OF REMOVAL OF STIGMA. ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR SEWELL. “The art- of acting has never been the same since the social stigma has been removed from actors and actresses,” quoted Professor W. A. Sewell in the second of his lecture series on the theatre at the teachers’ summer school at New Plymouth yesterday. The professor claimed that actors or actresses must make the choice between following the profession and being a “lady” or “gentleman.” They could not do both. Unfortunately, the modern actor had become “respectable.” Why was»it, he asked, that actors came under a social ban? They did something that no decent human being would do—undressed emotionally in public. Society could not tolerate individuals who wanted to exhibit themselves. Even in a drawing room if a person made himself conspicuous by his behaviour, people grew shifty and uncomfortable. The reason why drama in the West End of London had fallen so low was that actors were to genteel to exhibit themselves; they were merely puppets and the mouthpiece of a febrile stratum of society. Drama was essentially rebellious. Where it was good and vital it figuratively poked out its tongue at society. Where it accepted society, it sank into sterility and rigidity. Tragedy was the spectacle of a man daring to be free and comedy that of a man mocking a complacent order of things which comforted itself by laughing. Seeing the actor in his proper light, society had not tolerated him. The actor of Roman days was either a slave or a freed man without citizen rights. Patricians were not allowed to marry actresses. With Christianity the position became worse. Actors were not only'without civic rights, but they lacked the advantages of being members of the church. Thus driven out by bishop and barbarian, the actor wandered north, where he met the “scops,” whose business it was to entertain the Teutonic tribes by singing and playing. From the merging of these two groups came the medieval minstrel. He was a man with no prestige, who wandered from castle to castle uncertain where his next meal was coming from. It was he who became in the 13th and 14th centuries the actor in the ordinary sense and he who produced the morality and miracle plays. ELIZABETHAN ACTOR. Technically the Elizabethan actor was “a rogue, a vagabond, and a sturdy beggar.” In order to obtain a status in society he must attach himself to a noble patron. Sometimes, however, the Puritans or the plague drove the actor from London where, free of the patronage of his lord, he again became a vagabond. To escape that stigma he must go to the mayor of a town and perform his nlay. If it was palatable he was given a license; if not he was whipped from the town. Some of the actors when they left London went across to the continent in much the same way as performers who have passed their prime in modern times took a third rate company to the colonies. “Threadbare in London, they patched themselves up in Rotterdam,” and received a good hearing. Actors were never sure whether they would be visited by plague or Puritans—in either case it was equally difficult. It was Garrick, who set out to make tlie profession respectable, but he did not quite succeed. Scholar,. wit and gentleman, intimate of Dr. Johnson and Goldsmith, he did, however, place acting among the major arts. His work, however, was undone by Queen Victoria. In her reign the theatre suffered from her and the attitude of the court degraded dramatic art. But those men to whom the stink of grease pots was life, the vulgar, flamboyant, rhetorical men who were irresistibly drawn to the footlights, these men were magnificent in the theatre. A dead time for drama, the Victorian era was golden for the kind of acting that finally produced Sir Henry Irving. i Irving had done greater damage to the theatre than probably any other man ever did. He played not Shakespeare but Irving; mauled the text and mulled the words. Professor Sewell instanced the trial scene in the Merchant of Venice as an example of the methods of Irving. At the back of the stage was a huge grill through which the defeated Jews was to pass. The fundamental thing about the climactic scene of Shylock, said the professor, was that he should disappear quietly, almost melt away; that procedure was not possible for Irving. As he left the stage he tore the heart out of the audience because they saw through the grill a Venetian mob spitting at him. DEGENERATION OF TO-DAY. The actor to-day had degenerated into a gentleman, continued the speaker. There was every possibility that if a man acted badly enough he would be knighted. In London there had developed a nondescript personality, the West End actor. He mouthed his words and distorted the text: he was perfectly dressed and his manners were a curious compound of the gigolo and the public school boy. The women were polite and petite, and could not be mistaken for anything but ladies. If they were asked to portray anything that was not lady-like they failed, for gentility had choked art in London. Whether or not the type of play was partly to blame, the result was definite degeneration. There were differing styles of acting. It was entirely wrong, entirely insignificant for an actor to be natural or try to live his part. He must try to “put across,” as the character he was taking, a performance that would move the audience. Every feature of the setting was artificial and therefore the actor must use artifice to appear natural. In attempting to be natural he lost control. The worst actors were those who tried to live their parts. The name of acting was applied to very different sorts of skill. It classified the Greek tragedian with his mask and cothurnus. He spoke through a conch shell to enlarge his voice and stood on stilted shoes to add to his dignity, but in this formality and this stiff dress could translate into words something that seemed the quintessence of pity and terror. There was the Japanese actor with his grotesque make-up and the stereotyped movements that had been handed down for generations. There was Dame Sybil Thorndike tearing into tatters the beauty of the words of Medea. She gained sometimes a certain power on account of her very energy but artistically the performance was null and void, a translation into the rags of speech of what must have been the divine witchery of Medea. The style of the acting should be at one with the style of the drama and the two go together to shape the play. In the Greek theatre of formal masks and gestures there must have been knowledge of the exquisite rhythms that might be achieved by movement of draperies. Dance would be made surpassingly lovely and contribute considerably to the emotional appeal of the play, while the sonorous voice, though not responsive in quick give-and-take, would have been excellent for the de-

livery and the ritualistic, almost prophetic, lines. The Roman theatre was mainly imitative, but it was interesting as the precursor of such actors as Ruth Draper, who were almost the whole performance in themselves. Seneca was never acted; it was spoken by a single person. Dealing with the Elizabethan theatre, Professor Sewell said no-one to-day could speak blank verse as it should be spoken. It was rendered either by a person who felt apologetic that it was poetry and tried to make it sound as much as possible like prose, or by an elocutionist who whined out the delicious syllables. Blank verse needed to be declaimed, however, and declaimation was an art the magic of which was beyond the imagination of the 20th century. Lamb had said King Lear was a play too huge to be acted, but Shakespeare knew he had Burbage to speak it. In the 18th century, concluded the professor, there was a return to nature and a return to natural acting after the polish of the 17th. Romantic acting at its best was seen in Garrick, particularly in such performances as the ghost scene of Hamlet. In his whole mien,- one spectator had written, there was so much terror and amazement that a feeling of awe came over the audience even before he spoke. Every face in the theatre was immovable as if painted on the wall.