Judge — December 31, 1921 — page 16: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

ITTING before the performance of Mr. William Gillette in the concoction of arch nonsense called “The Dream Maker,” one is reminded again of the great charm that so often reposes in what is, critically, bad act- ing. This Gillette, by any sound standards, is a mere trickster of acting; yet there are few to deny that, for all his low estate as a histrionic artist, he is one of the most thoroughly engaging performers on our stage. And what is the secret of the para- dox? The secret, very simply, is that bad acting often enchants by virtue of its very artlessness, where highly pro- ficient acting leaves one cold. Acting that lacks sound artistic design is, in this, much like some ugly old easy chair. It has much of the cozy ease and agreeable friendliness that a beautiful, stiff Sheraton lacks. If acting is an art at all, it is the baby art. And, like a baby, sophisti- cation is, or should be, relevantly a stranger toit. Acting that is polished to the last degree is like a butler— distinguishedly lifeless. Mankind is itself a bad and fitful actor. Imita- tions of mankind upon the stage should have all of mankind’s flaws, weak- nesses, crudities and mistakes. Gil- lette commits a hundred sins against histrionic art in every one of his per- formances. Walter Hampden, to take a single example, commits not a tenth that number. Yet Gillette is ten times as pleasing an actor to watch. His monotonous voice has thrice the captivating quality of the fluid voices of a dozen Robert Edesons; his single awkward gesture six times the elo- quence of the studied gestures of all the John Masons who ever tortured the public eye. GILLETTE, however, is not the only bad actor whose very badness is refractorily fascinating. Cyril Keight- ley is another; Eric Maturin (whom we haven't laid eyes on since “Mid- Channel”) is another; and Reginald Barlow is still another. Dismiss from your thoughts, please, any notion that what I am saying here is an attempt at left-handed smartness. I mean seri- ously that these men are exceptionally effective actors because of their artis- tic guilt rather than in spite of it. They are, from the standpoint of pene- trating criticism, not ranking actors, but they are actors who get illusion out of one as colleagues twice as pro- ficient cannot. Where an artistically By Georce Jean NatHan cruder actor than Lowell Sherman; yet where, in certain rdles, one more peculiarly productive of results? Or, again, take such performers as Charles Cherry, Harry Mestayer, John Miltern, Kenneth Douglas, John Westley, James Rennie and Frank Sheridan. Surely it would be a schoolboy of a critic who would be so rash as to say that any of these are first-rate actors or— some of them — even second-rate actors. Yet surely it would be an old fogy of a critic who would not be so rash as to admit that they very often are doubly as effective as actors of vastly more finish and position. UST as there is sometimes in a per- formance of amateurs a winning quality that one doesn’t find in a per- formance of professionals, so is there sometimes in a crude professional performance a winning quality that one doesn’t find in a suave professional performance. To quote the old say- ing: It may not be art, but it’s life. Our tastes and prejudices are stub- bornly built that way. We—or at least those of us who are not given overly to critical affectation—have to admit that lack of sound merit is occasionally even more beguiling than sound merit. A perfectly rudimentary and untutored acting performance like that of little Miss Faire Binney in the late lamented dose of trash called “The Teaser” thus proves twice as re- freshing as would the performance of another actress of double Miss Bin- ney’s technical skill. Again, such a performance as that of Frank Shannon in “Anna Christie,” certainly one full of technical flaws, proves twice as felicitous as would one by an actor like Brandon Tynan, who is possessed of a greatly superior technical equip- ment. The positive charm of bad act- ting may readily be detected in the instance of such a performance as is often given by the veteran, William H. Thompson. There is to this actor’s bad acting a quality paradoxically so fetching and altogether engaging that he dominates ‘the stage even on such occasions as it is.simultaneously occu- pied by actors much better than him- self. This phenomenon is often ascribed idiotically to what is termed personality. But personality, in the sense that the word is thus used, has— unless I am very much in error—little or nothing to do with the case. I have seen Thompson on a stage with actors admitted to have personalities 14 of double the voltage of his own (and possessed of double his technical re- source), yet the old fellow has promptly won away from them the eye and ear and heart of his audience. PERSONALITY is a word employed by critics to conceal their failure to penetrate certain evasive paradoxes of acting. Surely Lou Tellegen has personality, but does it ever avail him anything when he is on the stage, whether in a company of good actors or bad? Russ Whytal has personal- ity, and so has Robert Warwick, and what does it profit them? No, the charm that often inheres in bad act- ing has very little to do with the personality of the actor. Take, for example, the case of John Flood. Flood has scarcely any of this so-called personality; he is a bad actor; yet he is more effective nine times out of ten than any other actor with personality and sound histrionic ability would be in the same réles. The same thing holds true of such actors as Joseph Kilgour, and, one might even go so far as to say, Douglas Wood. ACTING, in good truth, is a chame- leon ever beset by the intricate plaids of its spectators’ tastes, idiosyn- cracies and temperaments. Its colors change constantly, even though its fundamental shade may be blue—very. If fifty thousand people consider Robert B. Mantell the greatest Shakes- pearean actor who was ever born in Ayrshire, Scotland, on February 7, 1854, fifty thousand others consider him the worst. And if, on the other hand, one hundred thousand persons think that Duse is the greatest actress of our time, there are a great many who think her nothing of the sort. Acting always rebelliously reminds me of lemon meringue: you like it if it agrees with you, and don’t like it if it doesn’t—and it is comparatively just as much art. Personally, give me William Gillette, the bad actor, and you may have all the good actors like Pedro de Cordoba that you can lay your hands on. I once wrote of Ed Howe that his peculiar agreeableness as a surveyor of the human comedy lay in the fact that he possessed all the virtues and all the defects of one’s own father. The peculiar agreeable- ness of such an actor as Gillette per- haps lies in the fact that he acts pub- licly with all the artistic crudity that the rest of us act privately. comicbooks.com