Wairarapa Daily Times [Established 45 Years.] TUESDAY, JUNE 1, 1920. ACTOR AND ARTIST.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 46, Issue 14131, 1 June 1920, Page 4

Wairarapa Daily Times [Established 45 Years.] TUESDAY, JUNE 1, 1920. ACTOR AND ARTIST.

Whether the actor is an artist in the creative sense, as is the painter or the poet, has for long been a subject of keen debate. Actors have naturally sustained the while, just a-s naturally, dramatic authors have taken the negattive. Critics, as being cssenially more akin to the writers than to the players, have largely supported the side of the authors. The latter contend that the author is the true creator who has conceived the characters of a play, and fashioned them into living entities, while the actor is little more than a human marionette, who, having memorised the lines and assumed the habiliments provided, struts his hour upon the stage, and deludes himself that the audience has come to see him rather than the drama which he condescends to accept as the medium for the display of his histrionic abilities, liaddon Chambers coined the cynical aphorism: ‘‘There are no bad plays; there are only bad actors.” Bernard Shaw, who combines the functions of a most trenchant but acute original, learned and judicial critic with those of a dramatist who holds a unique place, in his famous “Dramatic Opinions,” virtually sides with the authors. He assails the widespread fancy that the old “stock” actor was a remarkably versatile individual, able to play at short notice any character from harlequin to Hamlet. Bernard Shaw further alleged that “ as a rule, when an Englishman can act he knows better than to waste that invaluable talent on the stage; so that in England an actor is a man who cannot act well enough to be allpwcd to perform anywhere except in a theatre.” Augustine Birred, in his essays, with that air of lofty detachment which distinguishes him, gently chides the aspiring mummer for venturing to imagine himself an artist whose work is to be compared with that of the poet or the sculptor, and as a parting shot at the great ones of the sock and buskin asserts that the real Hamlet is beyond acting attainment. So far i the authors have had it their own jv^y. . * yAi*

Let us see wliat representative actors have to say. Sir Henry Irving, who reached an eminence and popular adoration no other actor in modern times attained, never wearied of asserting that the actor was rather more important than the author. The author’s work lacked vitality until it had the breath of life breathed into it by the actor’s delineation. In this delineation the actor often plumbed depths of passion and attained heights of spirituality which the author himself had sot imagined. Irving's best part—or nearly the best, at any rate —Shvloek, is an apt illustration as to how a player can transform a part. At one time ‘ the Jew that Shakespeare drew” was represented as a preposterous compound of malignity and comicality; the “groundlings” hurled noisy imprecations at the bloodthirsty usurer, but were moved to hilarity by the “comic relief” provided by his exaggerated nose and his funny walk. Irving, bv the genius of his acting, convinced his audiences that the Venetian moneylender was a mediaeval llothschild who had no intention of into effect the clause in his bond which (rave as security a pound of Bassanio s liesli “nearest his heart.” Another champion of the actor has recently taken up his facile pen in the person of Mr Louis Calvert, an English player now domiciled in America. In “Problems of the Actor,” he says: “I believe that the art of the actor is quite as dignified, quite as ‘creative,’ as, and p«»haps evon more vital and potent than any other of the fine arts. . . Anyone who knows the real story of a play’s precarious journey to public favour knows how often a play, in the hands of the actors, grows far beyond the conception of the author.” Calvert tbeu enumerates several plays which as literature are unreadable rubbish, but which illuminated and bodied forth on the stage by great actors, touch the audience ns if they were made of immortal stuff. He instances, among others, such as David Warfield s celebrated “Music Master,” Joseph Jefferson’s “Rip Amu Winkle,” which took the world by storm, but which since Jefferson’s death lies unacted and unred, because it was the great creative actor, and not the lifeless lines, which gave a feeble play apparent power and impressiveness.