Plays and Players.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIX, Issue V, 24 July 1897, Page 139

Plays and Players.

THE Hastings Amateur Operatic and Dramatic Society held a meeting last week, when it was decided to open the season with a dramatic performance, and also to repeat the popular cantata, 1 Phyllis.’ Miss Amy Sherwin is on her way to Australia with a concert company. The brothers George and Mario Majeroni will accompany Mr Brough on his Eastern tour. The Lyttelton Times announces the death of Mr Mack Alexander, who was very well-known to Christchurch theatre-goers especially. He had been an inmate of the Christchurch Hospital for some considerable time past, and expired at that institution on Sunday last. THE LATEST EDISON MARVEL. Edison, the wizard, has said it, and it will be. The day is coming when we will sit in a New York theatre and enjoy a play or an opera at London, Paris, or Vienna. * I am certainly not going to give up till I am successful,’ he says of this, ‘ and every experiment I make brings me appreciably nearer the mark.’ So we may look forward with some confidence to the realisation of this wonderful scientific dream. Such a development of the combined powers of thekinetoscope and phonograph is indeed far from improbable. Both these mechanisms have produced marvels familiar to us all. It requires little imagination to foresee a combination of the kinetoscope on a tremendous scale, with a multiplicity of greatly improved phonographs, capable of transferring an entire play to a big screen of a city theatre. Let us project ourselves for a few minutes into the future and see what, according to Mr Edison, we will some day enjoy. There is a play, we will say, running in London that a New York manager thinks would be a splendid attraction. The players have a long engagement there. The metropolitan public want to see the play while it is new and creating a sensation, so the New York manager reproduces it by the means of Edison’s mechanical devices.

The stage of a New York theatre is entirely cleared, even the scenery being removed. A huge white sheet is stretched from the flies to the stage. It covers the stage completely, like an immense white curtain. The regular drop curtain rolls down over it. Behind the white curtains are placed a number of phonographs, with immense vibrating horns, capable of multiplying sound one hundred times. One of these phonographs is for each actor. If there be ten players in the cast, then ten phonographs are arranged behind the curtain. Each is loaded with the dialogue of that particular player. In the gallery, out of sight of the audience, is a huge kinetoscope, containing hundreds of yards of film, upon which is the whole play, actors, costumes, scenery, and everything. The theatre is then darkened. Suddenly there is a flash of electric light, and the curtain goes up on the first act. There it is, as perfect as life. You don’t realize that you are looking at a white curtain. You see what looks like a real stage. It is the picture of a stage of a London theatre. There are the scenery, the houses, trees, and pathways. The chairs look so real that you would almost dare sit in them, and even natural colours are reproduced. The orchestra is playing softly, and from the wings walks out an actress, not by the jerky fits and starts of the kinetoscope, but with a slow, easy, lifelike stride. She walks over to a table and picks up a bunch of flowers—flowers full of life and colour. She turns towards the audience and speaks. Her voice is as clear as a bell. You hear every word as distinctly as if you were listening to the living woman. The hero then comes on the stage You can hear his footsteps as he walks along. He greets his sweetheart. The moment his lips begin to move you hear his voice. The phonographs and kinetoscope are timed to the fraction of a second. The characters on the stage are life size and their voices are natural. You are looking at the pictures of the real players; you recognise them at once, and you are listening to their own voices, as natural as if it were themselves, instead of their pictures, actually before you. The play runs on to the end of the first act. when a climax is reached and the curtain goes down in the regular way. The theatre is instantly illuminated again and the next act proceeds. But up in the gallery the two kinetoscope operators are working with great rapidity, keeping track of the film that is running through the apparatus at lightning speed. On this film will be over 375,000 separate and distinct photographs, each one of which will in turn be thrown upon the white sheet at the rate of forty-eight a second—so fast that they appear to the eye as one moving, realistic scene, without break or blemish. The phonographs are operated by electricity, being connected on the same circuit that works the kinetoscope, thus making the

timing of a player’s motions and his voice correspond perfectly. Now Mr Edison says that not only is the plan feasible, but that it was his original idea, long before the kinetoscope had been invented, and that the kinetoscope was only one step in the carrying out of the great scheme. Since then he has had a number of experts constantly experimenting in relation to this plan, and only within the last week or two some experiments had been made which were more encouraging and hopeful than any that had gone before them. ‘There were two things,’ he added, ‘that had to be overcome, and these were the metallic character of the tone of the phonographs, and the change of its timbre to that of the human voice, so that all the beautiful modulations of the singers and actors could be exactly reproduced, and the second was the synchronisation of the phonographs with the kinetoscopic reproduction. No one that has not tried anything of this kind has any idea of the difficulty of this latter task. It is all very pretty from a theoretical standpoint, but when the attempt is made to carry the matter into practice there are all sorts of puzzling and worrying hitches in the programme, with the result that one must have a world of patience to overcome them. Nevertheless I believe that it will be possible to present grand opera on the stage in all the perfection of its detail, with nothing more than a big sheet, a lot of phonographs and a big kinetoscopic machine.’

The Queen does not go to the play or the opera, but the best plays and operas go to her. An ■ Elderly Gentlewoman ’ of the court, writing a chatty letter to one of the London papers some four or five years ago, recalled the old plays of ‘ The Unequal Match ’ and • The Three Golden Apples,’ and seeing the Queen laugh over • Lend Me Five Shillings.’ She recalled, too, the Queen’s pleasure at seeing Buckstone in ‘ The Overland Route,’ his sufferings from mat de mer, and the same most humorous of old comedians in ' Box and Cox.’ * Oh,’ exclaims the aforesaid gossip, • shades of Buckstone, and Compton, and of Chippendale, and of all those who trod the boards of the Haymarket to your Queen’s delight! Would that you could be here once more, and the cheery spirit of a happy womanhood be with her who has travelled so often through the vale of sorrow ! To me it seems but yesterday, those old stage days when the Duchess of Teck was seen smiling, nay, laughing heartily in the front of the royal box. The Queen and the Duchess have both known their troubles. So there have been of late many private theatricals at court, for the young people of the royal house all love the play of mimic life.’ Almost every theatre has one cat, if not more, on its regular staff, whose duty is to wage war on the rats and mice which infest the place. Actors and managers are generally superstitious (says the Stock Keeper), and attach great importance to the appearance of pussy on the night of a first production, and if she does venture to tread the boards on a * first night,’ it is considered to be a piece of good luck and a happy omen.