Mu. Arthur Styan

New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, Volume I, Issue 7, 1 April 1900, Page 562

Mu. Arthur Styan

The accomplished villain of the Bland Holt Company is a young English actor who has made a big success in the colonies. Off the stage he wears glasses, and if ono could put him in a clerical frock coat the result would be the mildest-mannered young curate that ever stepped out of Lambeth Palace. As Caliban in "Women and Wine," — a much over-rated play— he loses himself entirely ;

so he does in "New Babylon," wherein he enacts the brainless stick-sucking masher. But where he plays the gentlemanly villain in some others of Mr. Bland Holt's complete repertoire of melodrama, one is struck by the

sameness of his voice. As the blind, ruffianly and hypocritical beggar in "Life in London," he was excellent, and just as Miss Harrie Ireland was the perfection of graceful sinfulness in woman, so Mr. Styan fulfilled the role of the wicked man. I should say he could do even better things. He seems to have great ability, and with the rough edges of the file-like voice smoothed down, he might make a tender and sympathetic lover. I, for one, should be glad to see him play in something less lurid than the general run of Mr. Bland Holt's successful stories of tethered vice and harrassed virtue.