16 
LAND 6? WATER 
November 14, 1918 
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By W. J. Turner 
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IT was an excellent idea of Mr. Bernard P'agan's to 
produce Twelfth Night at the Court Theatre, and it is 
to be hoped that its success will induce him to give us 
some more Shakespeare — The Tempest, for instance, 
which lias not been played in a West End theatre for 
years. Twelfth Night is much the best and most amusing 
play in London, and Mr. Pagan's production will probably 
be a revelation to many people accustomed to the dull dis- 
tortions of Shakespeare which the late Sir Herbert Tree 
used to put on at Her Majesty's, and which were enough to 
make a critic headline his notices of the plavs with : BILL— 
THE EXPLODED MYTH. The essence of Shakespeare is 
only to be got on the stage through the acting ; the scenery 
needs to be as simple as possible — simple, but not ugly or 
incongruous, especially for the comedies which betray such 
a sensitiveness to physical beauty, beauty of nature, of 
clothes, of. voice, and of person ; that the setting, though 
unobtrusive, must be delightful to the eye and have a proper 
harmony. The setting, by Mr. Victor Machin, in Mr. 
Pagan's production, fulfils this condition and is its first 
satisfactory feature. The next important thing is to keep 
Shakespeare's balance. In Sir Herbert Tree's Twelfth Night 
it was a case of first there is Malvolio, and then there is 
nothing, and again nothing ; next there is Malvolio, and 
after that there is nothing and nothing ; then, but a long 
way off, there is Sir Toby, and again there is nothing and 
nothing. Finally, but so far away that he is hardly per- 
ceptible, there is the Clown, and after him there is nothing 
at all. To pull Shakespeare's structure out of shape in the 
pretended search for new readings is to spoil it, for the various 
elements are so skilfully combined that they lose half their 
virtue if taken out of their proper place in the picture. Mr. 
Pagan has not made this mistake, and, in consequence, the 
consummate ease with which Shakespeare handles his material 
;md plays upon all our senses in turn so that no one is ever 
surfeited, is revealed by the fact that we are kept at one 
constant pitch of delight from the first word to the last. 
Twelfth Night is the quintessence of romantic beauty, and 
there must be passion in the actors and a keen sense of the 
beauty of words, which they must utter lovingly as if they 
were musicians playing beautiful viols. Did ever a play 
begin more beautifully than this : 
Duke : If music be the food of love, play on, 
Give me excess of it ; that, surfeiting. 
The appetite may sicken, and so die.- — • 
That strain again — it had a dying fall : 
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound 
That breathes upon a bank of violets. . . . 
Then the very next scene, a sea-coast, begins : 
Viola (shipwrecked) : What country, friends, is this ? 
Captain : This is Illyria, lady. w 
VioLa : And what should I do in Illyria ? 
My brother he is in Elysium. 
I would go twenty miles any night to hear those four lines 
spoken as they ought to be spoken ; and I was grateful that 
Miss Zeah Bateman, who played Viola, was worthy of lier 
part, alive to the exquisite cadences of the verse, and using 
her beautiful voice and grace with a happy spontaneitj'. 
A poor Viola will absolutely ruin the play which depends on 
Viola — and, in a lesser degree, on Olivia — for its beaut}', as 
it depends on Sir Toby and Sir Andrew for its humour, and 
on Malvolio for its character. Miss Bateman was the best 
Viola I have ever seen, and anyone who wants to know how 
Shakespeare's comedies ought to be played should see Miss 
Bateman as Viola. There are people who say that Malvolio 
is the most important part in the play. I thoroughly dis- 
agree. Malvolio is a comparatively easy part, wonderful 
creation though he is ; provided he is not allowed to become 
grotesque, you can hardly spoil his effect. I have seen two 
performances of Twelfth Night this week — one at the Court 
and the other at the " Old Vic." — and in each case the Malvolio 
was well done. There was -more dignity in Mr. Waring's 
at the Court, but more gusto in Mr. Saintsbury's at the "Old 
Vic." No, there is not much danger with Malvolio, as long 
as he is not caricatured ; but the part which does demand 
great delicacy and skill, and which can make or mar the 
play equally with Viola, is the Clown's. It is the one serious 
defect of Mr. Pagan's production that Mr. Edgar Stevens is 
thoroughly bad as the Clown. Pive minutes of example is 
worth a page of argument, and I recommend anyone who 
wants to spend two enjoyable evenings to see Twelfth Night 
at the Court and at the "Old Vic," and see the truth of this 
himself. The Clown at the "Old Vic," Mr. Gordon Douglas, 
is Shakespeare's clown, but Mr. Edgar Stevens at the Court 
is never anyone but himself. He has the only really damning 
defect in an actor, and that is that he cannot act. The actor 
must have sympathy, he must act intuitively from his heart 
(or his stomach), but, at any cost, not solely from his head. 
Mr. Stevens gesticulates and prances about in a frantic 
endeavour to touch us ; and, like all bad actors, he over- 
gesticulates and over-prances, and has no repose and no 
feeling ; and when he sings he mouths and plays the same 
tricks with his words as he did with his legs and his features, 
and not only leaves us cold, but even irritates us. I dwell on 
this because the part of the Clown badly cast ruins the whole 
play, and the uninitiated who see Twelfth Night at the Court 
for the first time could never dream what an enormous differ- 
ence it would make if the Clown were equal to the Viola. 
But Mr. Pagan's box-office receipts would show the difference ; 
and besides Mr. Stevens' Clown makes Shakespeare out a 
fool, it is in the wrong key altogether. The clown who has 
to sing those beautiful songs is not a hard, brainless ninny, 
but a queer, lovable fellow. At the "Old Vic," the songs 
touch the whole house to a profound silence, but at the Court 
they have no effect whatever. It is heart-breaking; to think 
of those lovely things : 
O mistress mine, where are you roaming ? 
and 
Come away, come away, death 
being absolutely spoilt. 
Mr. Miles Malleson, as Sir Andrew, was extraordinarily 
funny and lifelike, while Mr. Horace Sequeira, the 
Sir Andrew at the "Old Vic." production, who was 
very good, made more of a caricature of the part ; there, 
however, the business of the fighting was better managed. 
Twelfth Night, I repeat, is far the best and most amusing 
show in London — revues and music-halls and George Robey 
included — and I advise everybody to go and see it. 
There is one bad habit, so common as to be shared by nine 
out of every ten Shakespearean productions, which it is 
necessary always to protest against, and that is the abominable 
practice of cutting up the verse so that it becomes almost 
indistinguishable from prose. Whether it is the desire of 
actors and producers to make it absolutely clear to audiences 
that Shakespeare's verse has as plain a meaning as Mr. 
Bottomley's prose, or whether it is merely sheer fright of 
verse as something beyond popular appreciation that causes 
them to so accentuate the grammatical structure as to destroy ■ 
the rhythm, I cannot say ; but it is, in either case, absurd. 
As an example, take those famous lines in Twelfth Night : 
But sat, like Patience on a monument, 
SmiUng at grief. 
These are always spoken from the stage in this fashion : 
But sat— COMMA — like Patience on a monument — COMMA 
— smiUng — COMMA — at grief. 
The consequence is that the rhythmic beauty of Shakespeare's 
verse is unknown to most theatre audiences. 
It is rumoured that there is going to be an attempt on the 
part of the Lord Chamberlain to restrict the freedom of 
the stage by making it a condition of the licences issued 
that the theatres are not to permit any private performances 
of any play which has not been officialh' sanctioned. This 
is a thoroughly outrageous attempt on the liberty of the 
individual citizen. There is a case for the censorship of 
plays publicly produced, such as we have at present, though 
that censorship has constantly made itself ridiculous by 
banning the wrong things ; but when it comes to allowing 
D.O.R.A. to say that a group of private persons may not 
get up private performances of new plays if the Censor dis- 
approves of the play because it contains a nasty woman 
who resembles his wile, or an attractive politician who belongs 
to the party he happens at the moment to detest, it is time 
to give a gentle reminder that we are Englishmen^ — not 
Prussians. The idea is so preposterous that by the time 
this is in print it may be definitely scotched If not, the 
next step^will be an inspector coming to approve of the 
pictures on our walls. 
