THE NEW ACTING—AND ACTOR

A New Type of Plays Has Necessitated a New Type of Acting

Arthur Pollock

ACTING is, like all the functions of the human race, subject to laws of evolution. Therefore, it is not always a reproach upon the "new school" to say that it fails to follow servilely the out-worn traditions of the hallowed past. A number of old-school critics seem always to forget this in speaking of the acting of the present. When they so bitingly berate the plays and playwrights, the players and play-goers of today, and bewail the disappearance from the theatre of all that ever was worth while, their tirades merely call attention to the fact that the dramatic art is just as plastic in the grip of circumstance as is mankind itself.

It is a peculiar fact that those who most persist in worshipping the past, gather the fewest lessons from it. So, at least, it seems to be with the critics of modern acting. They remain apparently unimpressed by the many intimations, periodically appearing in the drama's history, of the mortality of different types of acting. Just as new conditions give birth to new conventions, so changing circumstances slough off all outward variations of an art as soon as they have ceased to be in harmony with new necessities. Hence the actor must be continually discarding, always assimilating; at all times alive to progress as well as to precedent. He must, in a word, be Janus-faced. While the critic, living to be pleased, can be the last to change, the actor being one of those who live to please, must change to please and change to live.

IN the old days, frequently alluded to as the palmy days, when people had lost interest in the Bible stories performed in pantomime and the drama had become more ambitious, playwrights arose from the multitude and gave the willing actor sounding phrases to declaim. The playwright being prodigal of incident and language, the actor responded with an equal extravagance in voice and gesture.

A little after Garrick's time, when progress in the art of playwriting came to a halt entirely, all attention was centered upon the actor, and the drama itself was lost sight of. Their minds atrophied by admiration of the past, the playwrights ceased to solve the problems of the present and strove misguidedly to be facsimiles. Their dramas were either imitations of the plays of Shakespeare, or, later, machine-made copies from the school of Scribe. Both of these types furnished a mechanical medium for the player that could breed nothing but a machine-like acting. By performing over and over again the old plays, and the new ones built upon the old and time-worn models, the actor made himself a perfect mechanical contrivance for the presentation on the stage of the playwright's imaginings. He became a peg upon which the contemporary dramatist nonchalantly hung an assortment of selected passions and emotions designed to exhibit the physical and vocal virtuosity of the artist. Flexibility of voice and plasticity of form and feature, sufficient to enable them to run the longsuffering "gamut of the emotions" were the chief demands made by the drama of the day upon its actors.

THIS period produced such plays as "Virginius," "The Hunchback," "The Lady of Lyons," and "Richelieu," all of which, to one who feels that the drama should illumine life, and not obscure and falsify it, seem artificial, insincere and empty. On the other hand, it turned out such actors as the Keans, Macready, Forrest, McCullough and the Booths, and in them developed a technical proficiency such as had never before been attained, and of a kind that will, we hope, never more be needed.

But just as man, evolved from the monkey, lost his prehensile tail so soon as it had ceased to be a practical appendage, so the art of bravura acting was gradually outgrown. For a long time people in plays had been accustomed to act and talk as only the people in plays had ever been known to do. T. W. Robertson conceived the revolutionary idea of trying to make them talk and act as human beings do in actual life, and, unknown to him, Ibsen and the Continental dramatists had also scurried back to nature for respite from excessive artifice. These two movements supplemented each other, and there began to appear upon the stage the "natural" type of actor that we know to-day.

Ibsen, electricity, and adequate stage facilities banished many artificialities. Plays became comments, not travesties, upon life, and they were acted amid scenery that could be made to appear almost exactly like the ordinary surroundings of the ordinary man. Plays ceased to be nothing more than a collection of acting parts, and the actor, no longer fed with opportunities to "act" but put in a setting where exaggerated action was neither necessary nor natural, was deprived of his old incentive to saw the air and discourse most eloquent music to the accompaniment of sobs and tears and moans of fainting women. That is why to-day the art of the "palmy" days would seem to be a ludicrous anachronism. Edwin Forrest and many another actor of the pyrotechnic period of dramatic art could arouse in the modern playgoer no feeling other than pity or exasperation, no impulse other than to seize his—the playgoer's—hat—or even to leave his hat— and flee.

BERNARD SHAW has recorded that when actors were first sought to interpret Ibsen the members of the regular profession were found impossible. They had too much to unlearn. In their efforts to do nature justice they were handicapped by a superfluity of technique. The old-timer's aim had been to play upon you, to toy with you, to fool you; the new actor's object must be to inform you wisely with regard to life. But the latter's skill is no less great because it is not squandered in display, or because it consists partly in suppressing signs of skill. And his degree of culture, education and knowledge of life and human character must necessarily be greater than it ever before has been.

The playwright has now discarded the broad swift strokes of former days and begun to paint in finer colors. Hence the actor is required to reveal similarly fine distinctions in the delineation of complex characters. We have not now the simple villain who in every breath breathes villainy, nor the hero who is heroic every moment of his life. It was largely the presence of such characters in the older plays that made them great acting dramas. We have great acting parts to-day, but they are great for different reasons; and seldom do they prove self-acting. Our drama supplies the actor not with opportunities to "rouse the pit to transports," but to coax it into looking more comprehendingly on life.

THE old actor had played his part upon his person and his voice, as a violinist performs upon his instrument, seldom get; ting "under the skin" of the part for the very good reason, usually, that it was only skin deep. A part to him was an assortment of sweet sounds and stilted gestures. But by our discovery that life is not like that, we have left him far behind. In ceasing to strive for pathos in the Dickensonian manner, in dropping the Caravaggio-like contrasts for the subtler ones of Rembrandt or the more discerning genre studies of Millet, we have begun to demand more of an actor than mere unintellectual symbols of emotion. We insist upon the subtler brushmarks.

PASSIONS are no longer torn to tatters in our theatres; for our playwrights and our actors have come to realize that the average person, even in the greatest and most soul-stirring crises of his life, rarely palpitates visibly with passion, seldom writhes with serpentine symptoms of despair, never gives expression to his feelings with faultless elocution. Instead he is, more often than otherwise, merely silent, inarticulate, eloquently mute. When, in "Rutherford and Son," Janet is driven from home, she sits a moment, silent and still, then with a shiver rises and walks out alone into the world without having uttered a word, without even attracting the notice of her family. That is life. And to present such scenes upon the stage, the school of acting that represents emotion by hysterics is entirely inadequate. Imagine Sarah Bernhardt making such an exit.

And life itself has changed—at least externally. We are more stolid and self-contained, more monotonous, perhaps, than formerly. We are live coals which, now and then fanned by the breeze of strong emotion, momentarily emit a warm, steady glow of feeling. We are less elaborately demonstrative, less vivaciously mimetic than we used to be. In a word, we do less "acting" in every-day life. Hence comes the recent development of reticence in gesture and business, and the quiet charm of reposeful acting.

IF the actor's art is to be evaluated by his ability to tell the truth about life, then the actor of to-day was seldom equalled in the past. The fact that there are now no actors—just as, fortunately, there are no plays—like those of the days of the Keans, is indisputable, yet it is far from being cause for lamentation. We have no use for them. But the statement that the art of acting is dead must be classed with the similarly pessimistic assertion—made by those who find their pleasure in contemplation of the past—that the drama, despite the work of Pinero, Jones, Ibsen, Brieux, Barker, Barrie, Synge, and Strindberg, is hopelessly decadent.