Tuesday, the 27th—continued

We Discuss the Performance.—A Marvellous Piece of Workmanship.—The Adam Family.—Some Living Groups.—The Chief Performers.—A Good Man, but a Bad Judas.—Where the Histrionic Artist Grows Wild.—An Alarm!

“And what do you think of the performance as a performance?” asks B.

“Oh, as to that,” I reply, “I think what everyone who has seen the play must think, that it is a marvellous piece of workmanship.

“Experienced professional stage-managers, with all the tricks and methods of the theatre at their fingers’ ends, find it impossible, out of a body of men and women born and bred in the atmosphere of the playhouse, to construct a crowd that looks like anything else except a nervous group of broken-down paupers waiting for soup.

“At Ober-Ammergau a few village priests and representative householders, who have probably never, any one of them, been inside the walls of a theatre in their lives, dealing with peasants who have walked straight upon the stage from their carving benches and milking-stools, produce swaying multitudes and clamouring mobs and dignified assemblages, so natural and truthful, so realistic of the originals they represent, that you feel you want to leap upon the stage and strangle them.

“It shows that earnestness and effort can very easily overtake and pass mere training and technical skill.  The object of the Ober-Ammergau ‘super’ is, not to get outside and have a drink, but to help forward the success of the drama.

“The groupings, both in the scenes of the play itself and in the various tableaux that precede each act, are such as I doubt if any artist could improve upon.  The tableau showing the life of Adam and Eve after their expulsion from Eden makes a beautiful picture.  Father Adam, stalwart and sunbrowned, clad in sheepskins, rests for a moment from his delving, to wipe the sweat from his brow.  Eve, still looking fair and happy—though I suppose she ought not to,—sits spinning and watching the children playing at ‘helping father.’  The chorus from each side of the stage explained to us that this represented a scene of woe, the result of sin; but it seemed to me that the Adam family were very contented, and I found myself wondering, in my common, earthly way, whether, with a little trouble to draw them closer together, and some honest work to keep them from getting into mischief, Adam and Eve were not almost better off than they would have been mooning about Paradise with nothing to do but talk.

“In the tableau representing the return of the spies from Canaan, some four or five hundred men, women and children are most effectively massed.  The feature of the foreground is the sample bunch of grapes, borne on the shoulders of two men, which the spies have brought back with them from the promised land.  The sight of this bunch of grapes, we are told, astonished the children of Israel.  I can quite understand its doing so.  The picture of it used to astonish me, too, when I was a child.

“The scene of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem surrounded by the welcoming multitude, is a wonderful reproduction of life and movement, and so also is the scene, towards the end, showing his last journey up to Calvary.  All Jerusalem seems to have turned out to see him pass and to follow him, the many laughing, the few sad.  The people fill the narrow streets to overflowing, and press round the spears of the Roman Guard.

“They throng the steps and balconies of every house, they strain to catch a sight of Christ above each other’s heads.  They leap up on each other’s backs to gain a better vantage-ground from which to hurl their jeers at him.  They jostle irreverently against their priests.  Each individual man, woman, and child on the stage acts, and acts in perfect harmony with all the rest.

“Of the chief members of the cast—Maier, the gentle and yet kingly Christ; Burgomaster Lang, the stern, revengeful High Priest; his daughter Rosa, the sweet-faced, sweet-voiced Virgin; Rendl, the dignified, statesman-like Pilate; Peter Rendl, the beloved John, with the purest and most beautiful face I have ever seen upon a man; old Peter Hett, the rugged, loving, weak friend, Peter; Rutz, the leader of the chorus (no sinecure, his post); and Amalie Deschler, the Magdalen—it would be difficult to speak in terms of too high praise.  Themselves mere peasants—There are those two women again, spying round our door; I am sure of it!” I exclaim, breaking off, and listening to the sounds that come from the next room.  “I wish they would go downstairs; I am beginning to get quite nervous.”

“Oh, I don’t think we need worry,” answers B.  “They are quite old ladies, both of them.  I met them on the stairs yesterday.  I am sure they look harmless enough.”

“Well, I don’t know,” I reply.  “We are all by ourselves, you know.  Nearly everyone in the village is at the theatre, I wish we had got a dog.”

B. reassures me, however, and I continue:

“Themselves mere peasants,” I repeat, “they represent some of the greatest figures in the world’s history with as simple a dignity and as grand a bearing as could ever have been expected from the originals themselves.  There must be a natural inborn nobility in the character of these highlanders.  They could never assume or act that manner au grand seigneur with which they imbue their parts.

“The only character poorly played was that of Judas.  The part of Judas is really the part of the piece, so far as acting is concerned; but the exemplary householder who essayed it seemed to have no knowledge or experience of the ways and methods of bad men.  There seemed to be no side of his character sufficiently in sympathy with wickedness to enable him to understand and portray it.  His amateur attempts at scoundrelism quite irritated me.  It sounds conceited to say so, but I am convinced I could have given a much more truthful picture of the blackguard myself.

“‘Dear, dear me,’ I kept on saying under my breath, ‘he is doing it all wrong.  A downright unmitigated villain would never go on like that; he would do so and so, he would look like this, and speak like that, and act like the other.  I know he would.  My instinct tells me so.’

“This actor was evidently not acquainted with even the rudiments of knavery.  I wanted to get up and instruct him in them.  I felt that there were little subtleties of rascaldom, little touches of criminality, that I could have put that man up to, which would have transformed his Judas from woodenness into breathing life.  As it was, with no one in the village apparently who was worth his salt as a felon to teach him, his performance was unconvincing, and Judas became a figure to laugh rather than to shudder at.

“With that exception, the whole company, from Maier down to the donkey, seemed to be fitted to their places like notes into a master’s melody.  It would appear as though, on the banks of the Ammer, the histrionic artist grew wild.”

“They are real actors, all of them,” murmurs B. enthusiastically, “the whole village full; and they all live happily together in one small valley, and never try to kill each other.  It is marvellous!”

At this point, we hear a sharp knock at the door that separates the before-mentioned ladies’ room from our own.  We both start and turn pale, and then look at each other.  B. is the first to recover his presence of mind.  Eliminating, by a strong effort, all traces of nervousness from his voice, he calls out in a tone of wonderful coolness:

“Yes, what is it?”

“Are you in bed?” comes a voice from the other side of the door.

“Yes,” answers B.  “Why?”

“Oh!  Sorry to disturb you, but we shall be so glad when you get up.  We can’t go downstairs without coming through your room.  This is the only door.  We have been waiting here for two hours, and our train goes at three.”

Great Scott!  So that is why the poor old souls have been hanging round the door, terrifying us out of our lives.

“All right, we’ll be out in five minutes.  So sorry.  Why didn’t you call out before?”