the dramatisation of a striking incident, it has force and simplicity, the admirable quality of directness.  Occasionally the people are too eager to express the last shade of the author’s meaning, as in the conversation between Neste and Vivarce, when the latter decides to commit suicide, or in the supplementary comments when the action is really at an end.  But I have never seen a piece which seemed to have been written so kindly and so consistently for the benefit of the actors.  There are six characters of equal importance; and each in turn absorbs the whole flood of the limelight.

The other piece which made Saturday evening interesting was a version of “Au Telephone,” one of Antoine’s recent successes at his theatre in Paris.  It was brutal and realistic, it made just the appeal of an accident really seen, and, so far as success in horrifying one is concerned, it was successful.  A husband hearing the voice of his wife through the telephone, at the moment when some murderous ruffians are breaking into the house, hearing her last cry, and helpless to aid her, is as ingeniously unpleasant a situation as can well be imagined.  It is brought before us with unquestionable skill; it makes us as uncomfortable as it wishes to make us.  But such a situation has absolutely no artistic value, because terror without beauty and without significance is not worth causing.  When the husband, with his ear at the telephone, hears his wife tell him that some one is forcing the window-shutters with a crowbar, we feel, it is true, a certain sympathetic suspense; but compare this crude onslaught on the nerves with the profound and delicious terror that we experience when, in “La Mort de Tintagiles” of Maeterlinck, an invisible force pushes the door softly open, a force intangible and irresistible as death.  In his acting Mr. Charles Warner was powerful, thrilling; it would be difficult to say, under the circumstances, that he was extravagant, for what extravagance, under the circumstances, would be improbable?  He had not, no doubt, what I see described as “le jeu simple et terrible” of Antoine, a dry, hard, intellectual grip on horror; he had the ready abandonment to emotion of the average emotional man.  Mr. Warner has an irritating voice and manner, but he has emotional power, not fine nor subtle, but genuine; he feels and he makes you feel.  He has the quality, in short, of the play itself, but a quality more tolerable in the actor, who is concerned only with the rendering of a given emotion, than in the playwright, whose business it is to choose, heighten, and dignify the emotion which he gives to him to render.

DRAMA

PROFESSIONAL AND UNPROFESSIONAL