THE THEATRE
ON the eve of Signora Duse's appearance it would be natural to write about acting—and it would be simple, too, if the current season gave that art honour except in the breach. I do not mean that there are no satisfactory performances; nor that there are many unsuccessful attempts at great acting. What I mean is that on the strict and legitimate stage the effort to act is rapidly disappearing. I have never seen Duse; but even if every report about her excellence were misleading, there could be no question of her intention, of her style. She is, by every account, an actress; and the necessity to be an actress, or an actor, is one of those compulsions which civilization, or something, has considerably relaxed. Its place has been taken by the opportunity to be attractive, or a "personality," or a character.
In the case of Miss Ann Harding the talent for acting is genuine, and it is only a question whether she will be able to resist much more dangerous direction than she received in Tarnish. (By direction I mean also the lack of it.) Too frequently the projected character slipped into something else—the remembered way in which some other actress imitated a still more distant progenitor in a similar scene. The play was exceptionally interesting for one thing, a matter of capital importance—that the interplay of two human beings (the father and the mother) entangled a third, and actually were the "forces" which created the situation. Neither the plot nor the theme was so good; but an internal rightness held the play together and should have taught the director to prevent Miss Harding from ever falling out of character.
The Swan is a great satisfaction, and as far as Mr David Burton is responsible for it, he is responsible for the nearest thing to an unmixed delight I have seen-this season. Miss Hilda Spong has been quite unintelligently criticized for over-acting. She is simply a perfect baroque, wholly in the tone of one side, the comic side, of the play. I have never seen Miss Le Gallienne play so well—although I wonder whether she does not err in the other extreme.
