16 
LAND ^ WATER 
rB:ember 5, 1918 
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By W. J. Turner 
HANKERING after something sensational this 
week, I went to The Purple Mask. The Purple 
Mask is the kind of play which offers merely a 
bare framework for the actor. The author 
invents or "cribs" a plot, he provides sufficient 
dialogue to last three hours — stealing about twenty minutes 
by intervals — divides the whole into three or four approxi- 
mately equal parts, arranging, if possible, that each part 
shall end with a bang, and contrives that a man and a girl 
shall fall in love in the first act and embrace in the last. It 
is altogether a matter for nice matherfiatical calculation, 
and is by no means easy, except for those people born with 
the right sort of head. It is a campaign, a plan of action 
during the space of a few hours and, as in all such plans, 
the effect depends mainly on the persons playing the parts 
in it. 
The hero, of The Ptirple Mask is a gentleman whose family 
motto is "I take what I will." This considerate sentiment, 
with the ferocious aspect of its proprietor, is lithographed 
upon the hoardings about the city, and is what drew me to 
the Scala Theatre ; for I have a strong desire to take what 
I will, but have not been blessed with sufficient frightfulness 
of countenance to accompUsh it. There is, however, nothing 
terrifying about The Purple Mask, otherwise known as the 
Comte de Trevieres, as played by Mr. Matheson Lang, who 
is, throughout the play, singularly handsome and urbane. 
Mr. Lang convinces us by a quiet, easy self-assurance ; he 
looks large and conceivably dangerous, and though his con- 
fidence is rather the confidence of a prosperous American 
merchant selUng his well-known patent medicine than that 
of a clever intrepid French aristocrat, still it is confidence, 
and enables him every time he pays a call to leave his card 
"I take what I will," without any devastating snigger from 
the audience. On the other hand, though the acting is good 
enough to make the fellow credible, it is without distinction, 
and one can take no pleasure in it for its own sake. Mr. 
Lang does not take enough pains ; there is an absence of all 
those finishing touches so small in themselves, so mighty 
in their cumulative effect, which can make a play of this 
description extremely attractive, although there is nothing 
in it. The Chevalier of the Purple Mask ought to enchant 
us ; the way he walks, his manners, his voice, his dress, 
his every gesture should be a revelation. Schoolgirls ought 
to send locks of their hair to him, schoolmistresses ought to 
keep his photograph in their most especially private allDums, 
old ladies ought to sigh over him, and men should gnash 
their teeth and .scowl at him. They may, indeed, do all 
these things ; but it wiU be faute de mieux, for the Chevalier 
of Mr. Matheson Lang does not deserve them. 
The plot, if I can recollect it, is a series of dare-devil 
episodes, in each of which The Purple Mask turns the tables 
on his opponent Brisquet, the agent of the celebrated 
prefect of police, Fouch^. The Chevalier, known as The 
Purple Mask, is the man who is entrusted with executing the 
plans of the Royalists who are attempting to rescue the 
Due de Chateaubriand from Bonaparte. Why they want to 
recover this ancient duke is a mystery, as, when ultimately 
we see him, he looks as if he would be the ruin of any party. 
The conspirators have their headquarters in a haberdasher's 
shop in Paris, and keep an old Abbe and a few sandwiches 
beneath the counter in a cellar. The Abbe has nothing to 
do in the play except get in and out of the cellar, and lift 
his hands expressively, and now and then shrug his shoulders. 
The niece of the haberdasher, who is really a marquise, also 
lives in the cellar ; and there is another lady there of high 
rank, whose mission is to drop a couple of letters so that 
the niece can pick them up. They are addressed to Fouche 
and a gentleman whose name I have forgotten, warning 
them that The Purple Mask will abduct at a given hour the 
Prefect of Evreux. Why they choose to abduct the Prefect 
of Evreux, an apparently perfectly harmless fellow, is a 
puzzle only to those not acquainted with the absurd actions 
of Royalist conspirators ; but their object in informing 
Fouche is to get a sham ""Purple Mask" captured so as to 
make the pohce feel safe and relax their vigilance. The 
sham "Purple Mask," however, turns out to be the real one, 
and actually abducts the Prefect, in spite of his being sur- 
rounded by gendarmes and half a company of soldiers. This 
is quite an exciting scene — the best in the play, in fact. 
which thereafter suffers from our seeing every step coming 
long before it comes. 
The acting, on the whole, was fair, but suffered from the 
Lyceum habit of winking with one eye at the audience. The 
actor may be conscious of the audience, but he should not 
draw its attention to his consciousness of the fact that it is 
there. I don't know whether, when The Purple Mask was 
first played, the farcical side was equally strong as now ; 
but I should think it had developed. As Brisquet, Mr. 
C. H. Croker-King was at times (in the cellar scene) good, 
but at other times bad, as when lighting his pipe in the 
prefecture when "business," which might have been very 
funny, became ridiculously silly through sheer exaggeration. A 
Sergeant of Gendarmes was well done by Mr. Chas. R. Stone. 
I have been reading again Gilbert Murray's translation of 
The Trojan Women, which, although it is not considered by 
most people as one of the most effective of Etiripidcs' 
plays on the stage, is a great favourite of mine. Nothing 
makes one feel more keenly the lack of a National Theatre 
than to read a great masterpriece like this and never have the 
opportunity of .seeing it, and dozens Uke it, acted. It is to be 
hoped that the project of the National Memorial Shakespeare 
Theatre, which was fairly launched before the war, will not 
be left in abeyance any longer now. I am sure that a vigorous 
campaign all over the country would raise the balance of the 
money necessary — I believe that there is at least £100,000 
in hand already. The National Theatre, playing a repertoire 
of the best plays of the world at reasonable prices, would, 
I am convinced, be an enormous success ; and it will be a 
national disgrace if, after the war, London remains in its 
present condition of inferiority to minor German towns like 
Stuttgart, where there is a magnificent Municipal Opera 
House and Theatre far finer than anything in the whole of 
the British Empire. Surely there is some pubhc spirit in 
Londoners ; I feel confident it only wants appeahng to in 
the right way. The amount of money required is insignifi- 
cant, and it would be worth all the cost merely as propaganda. 
It used to make me feel crestfallen and ashamed, before the 
war, to walk about in Stuttgart, Frankfort-on-Main, Munich, 
Wiesbaden, and other German cities I visited, to see their 
enormous superiority in dignity, architectural beauty, and 
public spirit to our own. Coming from London, accustomed 
to our drab little commercial theatres stuck up back 
streets or between hairdressers and restaurants, to see these 
beautiful theatres that looked Uke — and, in fact, were — • 
public buildings situated in fine squares, many of them far 
superior .to the best of our Government offices, made me 
feel like a slum-dweller brought into a palace. It is incon- 
ceivable that London's present inferiority in this matter 
should continue. Londoner^, I hope, will not be content, 
after the war, to live in a city which is the largest and wealthiest 
in the world, but which is too mean-spirited and shabby to 
afford to erect one decent building as a national memorial 
to Shakespeare where they can see throughout the greater 
part of the year all Shakespeare's plays, as well as all the 
works of other great ancient and modern dramatists, ade- 
quately performed and staged. 
It is useless to expect the ordinary commercial speculator 
to put up a building which is not an eyesore ; for one thing, 
he cannot obtain the requisite space except at such a cost as 
to put his venture out of court as a purely commercial trans- 
action. The business man, looking for a financial and not 
a social return on his money, wall naturally squeeze his 
theatre in any odd corner, and partition back, sides, front, 
and all except the narrowest possible entrance off in shops. 
The only thing he can safely be trusted to do is to make the 
inside fairly comfortable, as that will obviously affect his 
audience ; but the capital city of England, to say nothing 
of the empire, should not depend on private speculators for 
its principal theatre, any more than it should depend on 
renting some haphazard structure run up by a contractor 
for its Houses of Parliament. 
The enterprise of individual citizens is what we look to for 
catering for a changing popular taste — whether it be the taste of 
milHons for melodrama or the taste of thousands for an "art" 
theatre hke that of Moscow — but for great, permanent social 
amenities such as a national museum, a national art gallery, 
and a national theatre, we have a right to expect the civic and 
national authorities to recognise their plain social duty. 
