Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/774

THE current month in the New York Theatre has been a constant temptation to the reviewer. He wants so much to set a date on things. The piece which stirred him most dated from three or four centuries before Christ. The production which caused the most comment was written in the seventeenth century A. D. The criticism which the month brought forth seemed to go back to that dim age when discrimination was not yet the proud property of the human race. And the present reporter, to make his point, must invoke December, 1896, as a temporal shield. That season lacked the new lighting and the higher stagecraft, but it was a fine year for it was the best of those years in which Bernard Shaw was critic for The Saturday Review.

The month was the month of Sir Henry Irving's production of Richard III. Conscious of the incapacity of any one individual to make headway against the tide of approval setting in for John Barrymore's Richard, I have turned to Mr. Shaw and find these words (written about one Barry Sullivan): "If he had devoted himself to the drama instead of devoting the drama to himself as a mere means of self-assertion, one might have said more for him." So much for Barrymore. So much, by implication, for Arthur Hopkins. Of the three men concerned with this production, Robert Edmond Jones alone comes out of it with a great artistic achievement to his credit. His ingenuity and his imagination are equally admirable, and the fact that he provided a setting which literally towered above M. Barrymore and the ill-chosen rabble of his cast, is not against him. It is not Mr. Jones' fault that he was asked to do well by a play which, if it had not been written by Shakespeare and did not provide a startling part for a very shameless actor, would never have come to production at all.

It was a production of Hamlet, with settings in another very distinguished style, which really gave Shakespeare his chance against the Medea of Euripides last month. The critical mind could no more be satisfied with Mr. Hampden's Hamlet than with the entire production staged by Maurice Browne and Ellen Van Volkenburg,