Actor and Audience

I

WE know what an audience sees when the curtain rises, and it looks upon the lighted stage; but what do the actors see in their mind’s eye when they look upon the darkened house? We know what the audience hears when it listens to the spoken lines; but what do the actors hear in the heavy silence, the restless movements, the misplaced laughter of the crowd? We know what the audience feels when the drama is unfolded, and scene after scene carries us to the appointed climax; but what do the actors feel when the long dim rows of men and women follow, or fail to follow, the movement of the play?

A vast literature has been written about the stage from the point of view of the critic who speaks for the audience; but very little has been written about the audience from the point of view of the actor who speaks for himself, and that little is seldom of an enlightening character. Yet the audience is the controlling factor in the actor’s life. It is practically infallible, since there is no appeal from its verdict. It is a little like a supreme court composed of irresponsible minors.

No people in the world have been more indefatigable than players in writing their reminiscences. They have filled fat volumes with anecdotes and adventures which make good reading, but which fail to clarify the subtle relations between themselves and the public. We listen to what they have had to say from the days of Colley Cibber to the days of George Cohan, and we are vastly entertained; but save for a few words here and there — noticeably from Mr. Arliss — we learn little of what we want to know. The comments of the discontented have naturally a keener edge than have the comments of the complacent, who appear to be immune from misgivings, and who are certainly immune from the subtle vice of self-depreciation. To Mrs. Patrick Campbell, for example, an audience is but another name for an ‘ovation.’ Her volume is one long record of ‘ tremendous applause’ and ‘tumultuous enthusiasm.’ Whenever I had the pleasure of seeing this handsome and, on the whole, satisfactory actress, the house was like most American houses, good-natured and uncritical; but there were apparently other nights in other towns when it ‘sat breathless,’ or burst into ‘roars of delight,’ and when she herself was ‘stupefied’ by the fervor of its responsiveness. Compared to such triumphs the successes of her contemporaries are tame and insipid. It is not from Mrs. Patrick Campbell that we shall learn anything of value about that most uncertain of entities, an audience.

Aristotle complained that the Greeks wanted happy endings to their plays. So do Americans. The Greeks seldom got what they desired, being recreated for the most part by dramas which were eminently calculated to lessen the innocent gayety of life. Americans refuse to grant more than a succèsd’estime to any play which is logically and inexorably sad. In this connection it is interesting to note Ellen Terry’s assertion that she played Ophelia (a part for which she was ill-fitted) better in Chicago than in any other American city, because the Chicagoans evinced a downright pity — which she sensed — for the unhappy heroine’s plight. Also that John Barrymore found the West to be more in sympathy with Galsworthy’s merciless drama, Justice, than was the Atlantic Coast; and that the sombre beauty of Peter Ibbetson made a stronger appeal in Canada than anywhere in the United States. Mr. Barrymore believed that this was because so many young Canadians had perished in the war.

Comments so well considered carry us as far as we are likely to get into the no man’s land which lies between the actor and the audience. They are at any rate more helpful than records of ovations and mishaps. Mr. Arliss, a very keen observer, confesses that he found himself confronted by enigmas which he solved with difficulty. He reached the conclusion that the coldness with which Disraeli was first received in the States was due to the haziness of historical association in the mind of the average American. Unless he were a Jew he knew uncommonly little about the subject matter of the play; and it was some time before he felt himself sufficiently at home and at ease to enjoy a flawless piece of character acting. In London the trouble lay the other way around. Englishmen remembered too much of their own recent history to relish the liberties taken by the dramatist. The consensus of opinion seemed to be that if the Bank of England had had such a faltering fool for a president, Britain never could or would have controlled the Suez Canal.

Mr. Arliss has real views concerning audiences. He insists that sometimes — though rarely — they have a magnetic quality which stimulates and inspires the actor; and that this quality is most manifest in their silence, ‘vibrating as it does with sympathetic interest and understanding.’ He goes so far as to admit that an actor becomes occasionally interested in his audience, feels a friendly relationship, and thanks Heaven it has imagination enough to supplement his inadequacies, to help him ‘out of many a tight place.’ At the same time there is a certain sense of hostility, or at least of battle, in his casual comparison of the average audience to an unfriendly animal: ‘Let it see you are afraid of it, and it will snap at you; face it boldly, and it will eat out of your hand.’

This sentiment is probably a survival from the days so robustly described by Mr. Arliss, when, as a young actor, he braved the gallery gods of a cheap theatre on the Surrey side of the Thames; gods who devoured sausages and chipped potatoes and fried fish, the while they expressed their approval, or disapproval, of the entertainment. The popping of corks, as beer and ginger ale flowed down thirsty throats, was so continuous that it failed to disturb either the house or the stage. A hardy race of players those were, in whose vocabulary the word ‘temperament’ had no place. ‘Acting is a bag of tricks,’ writes Mr. Arliss with engaging candor; and he learned early in life to put these tricks over. His admission recalls the inspired words of George Cohan when rehearsing a doubtful farce:‘Faster! Faster! Don’t give’em [the audience] a chance to think, or they’ll get on to us.’

Ellen Terry, who wrote almost as well as she played, has told us one interesting thing about audiences — that the presence of an actor in the house, an experienced man or woman who applauds with understanding, will not only quicken the intelligence of the denser crowd, but will give confidence to the players on the stage. She had herself felt this subtle influence at work, and she had heard Eleanora Duse say how sweetly and powerfully it had on one occasion affected her.

The frankness of Ellen Terry’s narrative, the unhesitating fashion in which she has recorded her failures, which were few, as well as her successes, which were many, is on a par with her generous and discriminating estimate of others. She knew that Booth made a masterly Iago, but that neither he nor Irving could play Othello. She considered that Irving’s presentation of Twelfth Night, that triumph of artistic staging, was on the whole a bad production, ‘dull, heavy and lumpy.’ She said of her first American audiences, not that they liked the performance, but that they wanted to like it — a subtle and penetrating distinction.

II

The reaction of an ordinary audience reveals as a rule only the simplest emotions. It is calculated to suggest a houseful of morons easily moved to tears or laughter, hysterical when it is not apathetic, absurd when it is not indifferent. So it was, I fancy, in Shakespeare’s day (there is more than one indication of how he felt about it), and so it has been ever since. Madame d’Arblay records her annoyance at the behavior of two young ladies who sat near her during a performance of Home’s Douglas, and who were so much affected by the hero’s tragic death that they ‘burst into a loud fit of roaring like little children, and sobbed on afterwards through half the farce.’ One of Madame d’Arblay’s companions, Miss Weston, complained that they disturbed her more composed distress; but Captain Bouchier was highly amused. ‘He went to give them comfort, as if they had been babies, telling them it was all over, and that they need not cry any more.’

Just as uncontrollable as these innocent young things’ tears were the terrified shrieks of mature women who sat in the darkness while that ‘bag of tricks,’ Dracula, was being shaken out, — bats instead of rabbits, — straight from the conjurer’s hat. They had come prepared to react, and they reacted. Every absurdity of that wantonly absurd play was greeted with gasps and shudders and hysterical laughter, as artificial as was Dracula’s mask. This sort of excitability is conspicuous in any audience which anticipates excitement. People who have been promised that they will sup on horrors at the Grand Guignol sit tense with apprehension, responding to every ingenious device, and trying hard to get their money’s worth of panic.

A lively writer in the American Mercury complained a few years ago that life had gone out of the audience, which used to be part of the show, but which had been reduced to a state of dumb passivity. It was to remedy this inertia that Mr. Christopher Morley opened his theatre in Hoboken, and invited all who came to it to take part in the fun. His experiment was eminently successful. In five months one hundred and fifty thousand people packed themselves into the old Rialto, to see a revival of After Dark. They took such an active part in the fun that Mr. Morley was a little more than satisfied. ‘There was real creative unity between the actors and the house,’ he said. ‘It was as though the footlights had vanished.’

This was exhilarating; but with the vanishing footlights there departed also that soothing silence which enabled the less strenuous portion of the audience to hear what was being said upon the stage. Mr. William Faversham was of the opinion that not since Elizabethan times had any houses exhibited such participative instincts; but he did not say that he personally coveted so lively a coöperation. Mr. St. John Ervine confessed himself delighted with the Hoboken experiment, but doubted if it would suit his cynical and melancholy plays. Mr. Morley himself admitted that the spirit of participation was apt to get beyond control. He pleaded humorously with his houses for decency of behavior, asked that no missiles should be thrown, and protested his reluctance to call in the quieting police. Finally, Miss Jane Cowl, an outspoken actress, said plainly and distinctly that the Rialto audiences were an ill-mannered lot, that their ‘fun’ spelt annoyance to their neighbors and embarrassment to the players, and that the example which they set had a bad effect upon New York theatres. It was her opinion that a ‘silently receptive’ house was the only one which made good acting possible.

If we turn back a page or two in the history of the American stage, we shall see no great cause to regret the polite apathy of the modern audience. It may not be ‘silently receptive,’ but it is — except under certain circumstances— silent. The Mirror of Taste and Dramatic Censor, a severe and short-lived Philadelphia monthly which was published a hundred and twenty years ago, gives us to understand that the theatregoers of that day were for the most part a race of ruffians. Men brawled and rioted if they were drunk, and threw apple cores and nutshells at their neighbors. Women of loose character talked loudly and lewdly to their escorts. Wise men who loved the drama well enough to seek it under these discouraging circumstances left their virtuous wives at home, and wore their hats throughout the performance to save their heads from the rubbish which was lightly flung about the house. There was plenty of fun to be had for the taking; but it was at the expense of the players and of the play. Not until the advent of Edwin Forrest and Junius Brutus Booth — robust men both of them, who tolerated no disturbance — were order and quiet permanently restored.

Perhaps England was not far behind the United States in permitting, and even encouraging, the audience to be ‘part of the show.’ Scott, writing in 1826, says that he went while in London to ‘honest Dan Terry’s theatre,’ the Adelphi. ‘There I saw a play called The Pilot, taken from an American novel of that name. It is extremely popular, the dramatist having seized on the whole story, and turned the odious and ridiculous parts, assigned by the original author to the British, against the Yankees themselves. There is a quiet effrontery in this that is of a rare and peculiar character. The Americans were so much displeased that they attempted a row, which rendered the piece doubly attractive to the seamen of Mapping, who came up and crowded the house night after night, to support the honor of the British flag.’

Noisy enough these seamen must have been. But they did not racket for the sake of racketing. Some nebulous sentiment of patriotism sustained both ranks of combatants, some dim notion that they were ‘carrying on’ for their country’s honor and their own.

It will be observed that while players do occasionally comment upon the emotions they awaken, the friendly or unfriendly atmosphere they create, they seldom or never allude to any critical estimate formed by their audiences, or expressed by those journalists who are austerely christened dramatic critics. A veteran actor has asked, rather superciliously, if anyone has ever heard an intelligent comment upon a play made by a member of the departing audience. Intelligence is a large order; but if we are content to be amused at such moments, we may have our fill of entertainment. When the curtain fell upon John Barrymore’s Hamlet, and I was making my way out of the theatre, wondering what principle had dictated the ruthless and arbitrary cutting of the text, a lady in front of me said to her companion: ‘What I liked best was that we had the play just as Shakespeare wrote it. There was n’t a line left out.’ ‘Oh, but there was,’ said the second lady. ‘I waited all evening to hear the queen say, “Out, damned spot!” and she never said it.’

Music-hall specialists, song-anddance men, popular ‘entertainers’ in revues, establish more intimate relations with their houses than do the players of legitimate drama, who are presumably absorbed in the characters they represent. Now and then the legitimates step out of their parts, to the confusion and dismay of the cast. Forrest once dropped his rôle to tell an indifferent audience that if it did not applaud he could not act. Irving, enraged at the reception of Twelfth Night in London, made an unsolicited speech in which he favored his hearers with his candid opinion of their understanding.

On such occasions actor and audience meet on a healthy and human footing; but the atmosphere of the play is irretrievably lost. How could Forrest have returned to the noble sententiousness of Metamora after a display of personal vanity? How could Irving have sunk his ill-humor in the fantastic foolishness of Malvolio?

III

It is probable that no man living knows more about audiences than does George Cohan, and no man living has told us less. He has been on familiar terms with them since infancy. He has approached them as actor, manager, song writer, and dramatist. He has fooled them to the top of their bent. He has won them to his mood, whatever that mood might be. He has written plays as quickly as any other man could read them. He has run five companies at once with the same facile unconcern. Talented in many directions, his supreme genius lies in giving a thing a name which carries it straight through. When he called his first song, ‘Why Did Nellie Leave Her Home?’ Fortune, sniggering, took him by the hand, and has never let go. He picked up a play by Arthur Goodrich entitled How Very American, Cohanized it into So This Is London, and ran it for forty weeks at the Prince of Wales Theatre. There is not a trick in the bag that he cannot handle at sight.

It was to be expected that Mr. Cohan’s reminiscences should deal frankly with facts. They are, indeed, as candid as the air. The adventurous thing called life is described with humor and relish. A strong flavor of domesticity pervades the volume, father, mother, sister, and brother appearing and reappearing throughout the narrative. Friends and neighbors and theatrical agents play their parts. The audience only is eliminated. It was evidently something which bought tickets, and which had to be cozened into the belief that it had got its money’s worth, and that was all. As for every audience having a character of its own, hateful or lovable as the case may be; as for the ‘distinct but invisible chuckle’ which heartened Mr. Arliss, the careless cough which depressed him, the élan, vital and swift, which flowed like an electric current from the house to make his heart beat faster — such subtleties have no place in Mr. Cohan’s amusing and amused regard.

Neither have they in Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s (let us give him his full designation), for that distinguished actor, who has written an autobiography as dignified as Mr. Cohan’s is graceless, never mentions his audiences save when something unseemly has occurred, or when the house is graced by royalty. He tells a great many stories, but they are about people in high life (we keep genteel society in this volume); and on the last page he makes the astonishing admission that he was never meant for an actor, and never liked to act. He went through his part every night, longing for the curtain’s final descent. No wonder his house — save as a paying proposition — failed to interest him. Yet this was the man who played Hamlet with such profound intelligence, and whose Cæsar in Shaw’s masterpiece was a thing to be remembered for a lifetime. And this was the man to whom was vouchsafed the most amusing experience which theatrical gossip has to tell. It was at a London performance of The Profligate, and the first act was well under way, when from the stalls a voice plaintive and inebriated cried out in uttermost despair: ‘My God, I’ve seen this play before ! ’

Mr. Roland Young, a very charming actor, took sufficient cognizance of his audiences to accuse them of every conceivable misdeed. They came late, they missed the best jokes, they invariably laughed at the wrong time. A New Year’s Eve audience was his particular detestation; and it is interesting to note that on this point most players have agreed with him. Perhaps theatregoers are prone to eat and drink too much on this merry night, and so unfit themselves for intelligent listening; perhaps they are demoralized by the absurd and unauthorized price they have to pay for their tickets; perhaps men and women who pay this price because it is New Year’s Eve are necessarily lacking in mentality; for one or for all of these reasons the holiday which enriches the managers yields little satisfaction to the stage.

The worst, or at least the most distressing, misconduct on the part of an average audience is untimely laughter. Henry James maintained that only English-speaking people were capable of this bêtise. The French were too intelligent to blunder grossly, the Italians too sympathetic, the Germans too well informed. He confessed that he never took a foreigner to a serious play in London without a feeling of shame at the tittering he heard on every side. He instanced that grim drama, Rutherford and Son, as a case in point. A portion of the house seemed to find it funny, and laughed throughout with cheerful misconception. On the other hand, be it remembered that a London audience, harassed beyond endurance by the persistent giggling of two women during a performance of Hedda Gabler, hissed the offenders so furiously that they fled frightened from the theatre.

When St. John Ervine’s play, John Ferguson, was given in Philadelphia, it was received with laughter. Now I am aware that a very able writer has denied in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly the existence of modern tragedy. Nevertheless John Ferguson is an unrelenting study of all that life holds of tragic. Not for a moment is there a ray of hope or a release from pain. It was said that women laughed from sheer nervous tension, and this was in a measure true. But they laughed principally because one of the characters was an idiot, and they considered that all remarks made by an idiot are necessarily laughable. That his uncanny prescience deepened the horror of the situation was not apparent to their minds. Miss Helen Freeman, who took the part of Hannah Ferguson, was asked how she and the rest of the cast bore this incredible lack of understanding. She said that at first they felt they could not go on with their parts; but that they had steeled themselves to concentrate their minds upon the stage, and to forget the people in front of them. In other words, the audience which stood responsible for the success of the play, and which should have been vividly present as an incentive to the players, had become a bugbear to be ignored, and, so far as it was possible, forgotten.

IV

If this can be the case when actors and audience speak the same tongue, and there is no material barrier between them, it must be a strange and discouraging experience for a foreigner to confront a houseful of people to whose mentality he has no clue, and of whose comprehension he has no assurance. We still hear the echo of Rachel’s bewilderment when she played in New York in 1855, that being the first time that the French language had been heard on an American stage. The drama was Corneille’s Horace, and a translation had been printed in a thin pamphlet for the use of theatregoers, who did not then sit in profound darkness. The rustling of paper as hundreds of women turned their pages at the same moment (such men as were awake being content to understand nothing) made a sound which the veteran actor, Léon Beauvallet, compared to the sudden beating of rain against a window. Rachel, at all times nervous and irritable, was driven frantic by this monotonous and recurrent sound, and even Beauvallet confessed that he preferred the somnolent silence of the male. In fact, he had for it the Frenchman’s true understanding and sympathy. In his memoirs we find the first authentic notice of that great American institution, the tired business man. ‘Men who have worked hard all day,’ he observed, ‘do not seem entertained by French Alexandrines. If they shut themselves up in a theatre, they want gay, light plays which divert them, and distract their minds. I am far from reproaching them for their choice.’

If the foreign actor has a difficult part to sustain, the American who goes to hear a French or Italian play has troubles of his own. His one chance of enjoyment is to sit in the centre of a large and empty box, far from the madding crowd of women who are freely translating to one another in the stalls. Invariably the cultivated person who understands, or who thinks she understands, French is accompanied by one who knows she does n’t; and the whispered explanations make a sibilant undertone more disturbing, if such a thing were possible, than the rustle of paper. This appears to have been a pleasant old custom, for Mr. Pepys tells us that he went to see a tragedy called The Cardinal, and, with his customary adroitness, managed to slip into a private box next to the king’s. It was already occupied by several French gentlemen who did not understand what was being spoken on the stage; so, at their earnest entreaty, a lady undertook to tell them what the play was about. They were lively, she was solicitous, and the translating made ‘good sport’ — at least for the box. How the rest of the house felt about it was a matter of indifference to Mr. Pepys. He admits that he could hear little that the players said; but as the piece was ‘no great thing,’ he did not mind losing it. The lady and the French gentlemen were, on the whole, more entertaining.

The theatregoers of our day would rather hear an inferior play than hear their neighbors’ conversation. On this point they and the actors are in accord, though neither can compel a civilized silence in the house. Even musicians are only partially successful, with the exception of Dr. Leopold Stokowski, who has his Philadelphia audiences under such good control that they hardly dare to breathe. They sit motionless as cataleptics, would strangle rather than cough, and regard a sneeze as impious sacrilege. When a symphony is concluded they have permission, grudgingly given, to applaud. Stokowski does not hold with this boisterous clapping of hands, nor does he consider it a fitting recognition of music; but he has conceded the point out of generous sympathy with his orchestra, which likes a tribute to its worth.

The ‘full and understanding auditory,’ which has been the desire of the actor’s heart from Shakespeare’s time to our own, is a boon seldom vouchsafed. The house is often full and sometimes understanding, but only on rare and happy nights is it both. Weird enthusiasms incite the dramaloving world, and dull incomprehension misleads it. Neither of these eventualities can be foreseen. The producer who keeps his finger on the public pulse is aware that his diagnosis is fallible. He stands ready to administer a merry or a dismal, a bawdy or a ‘sweet pure little’ play, and he does not know which will avail. The dramatist is inured to surprises. The actor plays his part in doubt and bewilderment. On the one hand, we hear Ellen Terry wondering why it was that British matrons of high estate — among them Princess Mary of Teck — would take their daughters to hear Gounod’s Faust, but would not take them to see Goethe’s Faust. On the other hand, we hear John Barrymore voicing a mild amazement that Americans, who had spells of virtuous recoil, ‘did not seem to mind’ the obvious fact that The Jest, which ran so successfully, ‘was like a bullfight in a brothel.’

To such enigmas the long rows of men and women sitting on uncomfortable seats in the darkness can offer no solution.