Tuesday, the 27th—continued.
We Discuss the Performance.—A Marvellous Piece of Workmanship.—The Adam Family.—Some Living Groups.—The Chief Performers.—A Good Man, but a Bad Judas.—Where the Histrionic Artist Grows Wild.—An Alarm!
" And what do you think of the performance as a performance?" asks B.
"Oh, as to that," I reply, "I think what everyone who has seen the play must think that it is a marvellous piece of workmanship.
"Experienced professional stage-managers, with all the tricks and methods of the theatre at their fingers' ends, find it impossible, out of a body of men and women born and bred in the atmosphere of the playhouse, to construct a crowd that looks like anything else except a nervous group of broken-down paupers waiting for soup.
"At Ober-Ammergau a few village priests and representative householders, who have probably never, any one of them, been inside the walls of a theatre in their lives, dealing with peasants who have walked straight upon the stage from their carving-benches and milking-stools, produce swaying multitudes and clamouring mobs and dignified assemblages, so natural and truthful, so realistic of the originals they represent, that you feel you want to leap upon the stage and strangle them.
