Some plays in Paris. “Ces Messieurs” at the Gymnase, once prohibited by the Minister of Public Instruction, is unsatisfactory, but well acted. Little theaters, like the Berkeley Lyceum, immensely popular in Paris. In London one feels more at home because the dramatic atmosphere seems more wholesome. Alfred Sutro’s play at the Garrick, “The Walls of Jericho,” the most successful of the season. Other plays and some players

TWO distinct sets of impressions were carried away from the Paris season by two distinctly different individuals. One pure and conventional set was borne by that extremely nice and unsophisticated young man, the King of Spain; the other by that not-so-nice, more sophisticated, less-young person whose name appears at the head of this. We jostled each other—the little juvenile king and myself. He, poor young man, was taken by thoughtful people, who had his welfare at heart, to that over-advertised home of mediocrity, the ThÉÂtre FranÇais, and to a “gala” performance at the OpÉra; I—well, I went where I liked. Not being a young king, it was not necessary that my impressions should run along conventional grooves.

The King of Spain saw what he could see anywhere, and would probably avoid seeing in his own country. I was able to select my own dramatic fodder. Possibly we were each equally glad when we had done our duty and were allowed to proceed. If the King of Spain rejoiced more than I did, then he must have been exceedingly exultant. We found the Paris season quite disordered and fatigued. The Grand Prix was in the air; open-air vaudeville was hurling defiance at the drama; Bernhardt and RÉjane were packing themselves off to London; it was all very comfortless and noisy. I felt sorry for the little King of Spain, as I saw him bowling along the Rue de Rivoli bound for the FranÇais. I was on my way to the Gymnase to see the new shocker called “Ces Messieurs.”

The most uncomfortable and gloomiest theater in Paris has given itself up to the laudable purpose of stirring up dissension. Last year it was “Le Retour de Jerusalem” that aimed at fomenting anti-Semitic feeling; this year it is “Ces Messieurs,” the sole object of which is to stir up anti-clerical strife. Perhaps the Gymnase needs this sort of “attraction.” I cannot imagine anybody sitting tortured in its stuffy, ill-kept, poverty-stricken auditorium for mere restful enjoyment.

“Ces Messieurs,” from the pen of M. Georges Ancey, was prohibited for a long time by the minister of public instruction, a benign censor, who objected to the play because it attacked the priests. His decision was, of course, bitterly resented; and it was asserted that MoliÈre in “Tartuffe” had done a similar thing, and was a classic. Possibly we should have urged the same arguments in New York if—let us say—Mr. Theodore Kremer had woven a brand new melodrama around the theme of Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline,” and it had been “stopped” on the ground of impropriety.

The drama at the Gymnase seemed to me rather a pitiful effort at sensation. There is but one way of treating a priest upon the stage, and it is by placing him in juxtaposition with a woman. He is rarely allowed to be interesting in any other shape. Among actors there is a superstition that regards every play with a priest in it as “unlucky.” The cleric is supposed to “hoodoo” the drama. If I were a playwright I think I should elect to be on the “safe side.” I should take no risks, for very rarely does a priest-ridden drama succeed. “Ces Messieurs” certainly seems to be a case that justifies the actors’ superstition.

The heroine of the piece is a young widow, who, after the loss of her husband and child, has given up mundane pleasure. She lives in the provinces, with a large and singularly talky family, and has “taken up” religion. Upon the scene comes the AbbÉ Thibaut, a young priest with good looks and even better intentions. He is eloquent and mystic; Henriette interests herself in him immediately, and gives him funds for his schools and benevolent institutions. Thibaut is ambitious, and he needs the money. The man and woman are soon embroiled in an “affair,” though they are both unconscious of that fact.

Other priests occur. One—the villain of the piece—reports Thibaut to the other, a benevolent Monsignor, who is displayed in a luxury of “monsignor” robes. Pettiness, intrigue, jealousy, hatred, malevolence, are ascribed to the AbbÉ Morisson, who is as deep-dyed a villain as one could wish to find in the Third Avenue Theater or the Grand Opera House. Through a sea of talk, the audience is carried to the fourth act—which is the act—where Henriette learns that Thibaut is to be removed from her clutches to another scene of action. Then the storm bursts, and the air is cleared with much electrical sensation.

It is not necessary to go into details. All that a woman can say who has horridly mixed up the religious with the secular, the carnal with the mystic, Henriette says, in an ecstasy of exclamation points. Thibaut was essential to her, for she could not pray without him! He was part of her life, both earthly and heavenly. In an exasperation of anguish she develops a sort of insanity that makes a plausible excuse for the ugly irreverence and the blasphemy of the playwright.

Blasphemy always seems to me the weakest sort of sensation. Any idiot can blaspheme, and most of them do. It is the keynote of “Ces Messieurs.” The priest is the target at which the woman hurls her ugly shafts. Sensuality masquerading in the cloak of religion renders this heroine as disagreeable as any I have ever seen staged. And this—with nothing more—is M. Ancey’s case against the priests. The AbbÉ has accepted Henriette’s money for his works of benevolence, and she had given it not because she was actuated by religion, but because she was hopelessly in love with the priest himself, who had involuntarily inspired the sentiment.

There was nothing at all in the play but this fourth act, that gave you mingled sensations of disgust and shock. Moreover, nothing happened. After Henriette’s insanity, during which she threatened the priests with all sorts of scandals, she calmed down, went back to the family, devoted the rest of her life to her little nieces and nephews, and lived happily ever afterward. The moral—as far as I could see—was that women menace the life of priests, and not, as M. Ancey tried to insist, that priests threaten the welfare of women. The minister of public instruction, who must be as silly as the London censor, objected to the piece because it was supposed to malign the priesthood, and to hold it up as something to be ousted from the domestic hearth. The piece taught me quite a different lesson. It was that priests should beware of designing but apparently perfect ladies.

Fortunately “Ces Messieurs” was well acted. Madame AndrÉe MÉgard played Henriette with exquisite distinction and much dramatic power. AndrÉ Hall was the AbbÉ Thibaut, and into the rÔle he managed to infuse a good deal of picturesque mysticism. The other priests were assigned to M. Arvel and to M. Jean Dax, who resisted the temptation to cheapen a cheap subject.

The cream of Paris—generally called “tout Paris,” which is quite a mistake, because the underlying milk is more important—no longer goes to the big, usual, conventional theaters. Little nooky places have become immensely popular here, and are gaining ground all the time. The Grand Guignol, the Boite a Fursy and the Mathurins are always packed to their tiny little doors, and the idea is to present varied dramatic entertainments in capsule form. It is the idea that Mr. Frank Keenan essayed so unsuccessfully at the Berkeley Lyceum in New York last season. Paris is fatigued, and finds no trouble in digesting tabloids. New York, still young, vigorous and hale, prefers its drama in lumps, and suffers from no dyspeptic results. We are not yet ready for drama in whiffs. In Paris that is the approved style of taking the medicine.

While the little King of Spain was inhaling grand opera, I took five dramatic pills at the Mathurins. It is such a tiny little place that at first I thought I had gone wrong, and was in an antechamber. Plain papered walls, ascetic chairs, a moldy piano, and a couple of usherettes seemed extremely bare. The price of admission did not suffer in the same way. It was exorbitant. The Mathurins was crowded with a swagger-looking collection of men and women. Above its doors appeared the following, that you may translate for yourselves:

The five plays at the Mathurins were “Retour de Bal,” by Claude Real; “Oui! Benoist,” by Rito de Marghy; “Le Chasseur de Tigre Blanc,” by Tristan Bernard; “La Rupture,” by M. NoziÈre, and “Le Pyjama,” by Jules Rateau. Two of these, the second and fourth, were blood-curdlers, in the style of Edgar Allan Poe, with modern improvements and a Parisian outlook.

“Oui! Benoist” was a frenzied effort to be grewsome. The title represents the incessant remark of a country clodhopper to his “boss.” This “boss” was in love with a stout siren, who preferred a neurasthenic gentleman perpetually haunted by a particular melody. This melody had got on his nerves and had made him insane. (I couldn’t help wondering if he had enjoyed a season in musical comedy in New York, for, if so, I could quite understand his case.) Mathyas, as he was called, was trying to live down the melody, and nobody dared to hum it in his presence. He was made up with a white face, and dark rings under his eyes. The siren was most solicitous for his welfare.

Then came the innings of Benoist, the jealous “boss.” There was a well upon the stage, very deep and dark, and—in dismal conspiracy—he prevailed upon the country clodhopper to go down into the well and from its depths sing up the forbidden melody till it reached the neurasthenic gentleman. The scheme worked. No sooner was the invalid upon the stage than from the bowels of the well the luckless dirge emerged. Instantly the patient was stricken. In wild insanity, he took a huge stone, and flung it into the well to kill the music.

Groans and anguish from the clodhopper. Agony all over the stage.

“Are you mortally hurt, Joseph?” asked the guilty “boss,” peering into the depths.

And from the well came up the halting murmur, “Oui, Benoist!” as the curtain fell.

The other blood-curdler was “La Rupture,” which introduced Mme. Polaire, a lady who has had a multi-colored career. At one time she was a sort of rival of Yvette Guilbert. At present she does the melodramatic upon the slightest provocation. Her “attraction” is her ugliness—her extreme and unmitigated homeliness. Even that sort of thing is popular in fatigued Paris. A woman who is homely to the verge of distraction may be as great a draw as her sister who is just as bewilderingly beautiful. It is the extremes that meet. In “La Rupture” Mme. Polaire played the part of a woman with a poor lover. She was very fond of him, but he was impecunious, and she was expensive and terribly jealous. So she listens to the suit of a disgusting old fossil, who is smitten with her charms. Her repulsion is displayed with startling realism, and it furnishes the cue to the lover, who darts out and stabs the old man in the back. He falls dead, and there is a panic-stricken scene between the lovers. The woman is terrified; the man is horror-stricken; the corpse lies before them. There is a dark green atmosphere, full of the hoarse whispers of the guilty couple, in recrimination and disgust. There is no end to “La Rupture.” It leaves off suddenly; the curtain falls. You spear a sensation, but it is half-fraudulent.

Across the Channel, and to London. It seems healthier, even if it isn’t. At any rate, one feels more at home there. The American manager stalks through the English land, with his pocketbook in evidence, and his plans neatly newspapered. He is a bit lost in Paris, because he can’t produce the plays offered there without adapting them, and in the adaptation much is lost, and nothing takes its place. He sees a Parisian success, but the hero and heroine are never married. That is the stickler. A wedding ring would ruin them, and we have our little prejudice in favor of that magic circlet. The wedding ring may not be artistic—that is the Parisian answer to our plaints—but until we have discovered something that will aptly take its place, we prefer it. The American manager dare not fly in the face of the wedding ring, and that is why he shuffles about rather uneasily in Paris.

Sometimes he takes his adapter with him to see these French plays. Even that is unsatisfactory. The adapter is human, and he wants some work to do-o-o. He scents “possibilities,” and he is not afraid to say so. But French plays are becoming more and more impossible for New York. An American audience will not stand talk, and a French audience enjoys it when it hovers around the one eternal theme. Then the French idea of ending happily differs so essentially from the American notion, which is indissolubly allied with the wedding ring. The merry peals of nuptial bells ring no music into French ears.

The one attraction of the London season that has “attracted” is Mr. Alfred Sutro’s play at the Garrick Theater, called “The Walls of Jericho.” Mr. James K. Hackett, who has hitherto contented himself with being merely beautiful, in the rÔles of fanciful and highly upholstered kings, and the daredevil idiots of cheap, book-tweaked “romance,” has secured the play for New York. Mr. Hackett will have to forego his gilt and plush adornments, the silken tights that he has worn so long and so lovingly. He will have to dress as a modern man, and to blazon forth the persistent and hackneyed criminality of that section of humanity known as “society.”

Society, as we are all aware, has an irresistible attraction for the “kid-glove” playwright. Whether it be a case of “the fox and the grapes,” or a mere gallery desire to cater to the multitude, certain it is that the dramatist, skilled or unskilled, delights in portrayal of the alleged smart set; even if he be forced to approach the tinsel glories of Mayfair and Fifth Avenue by the way of the scullery door. Even if all his “points” be obtained from a communicative Jeames or a not-too-reticent Sarah Jane, he is not dismayed.

Society must be shown up and periodically exposed; its vagaries must be held up to ridicule; it must be set forth as degenerate; it must be made to suggest the effeminacy and luxury of Rome at the time when Mr. Gibbon made it “decline and fall.” How to do this perpetually, and with a “new wrinkle”? The playwright in reality has no grudge at all against “society”—that is blissfully unaware of his very existence. His object is merely to evolve some sort of a “roast” that has a semblance of novelty. In London there are penny papers devoted purely to “society gossip” that are boons to the ambitious playwright—and to Sarah Jane. Mr. Alfred Sutro, author of “The Walls of Jericho,” was in luck. In England at the present time there lurks a horrible disease known as “bridge.” It is a kind of mania on this side of the pond, and, although it is quite as middle class, and even lower class, as it is smart set, naturally Mr. Sutro need not notice that unimportant fact. That society plays bridge is no more remarkable than that society golfs and motors. Mr. Sutro’s point—very far-fetched, cheap and sensational—is that Mayfair has undermined and corrupted itself by the game. According to “The Walls of Jericho,” bridge seems to be responsible for childless women, sexless ladies, an unmoral outlook and other ills from which society—in novels and on the stage—is bound to suffer.

From what I have seen of the game—and I am not a card player—it seems to be nothing more than disagreeable in a very ordinary way. Every fellow hates his partner, and dogs certainly delight to bark and bite—for is it not their nature to? But, as for any illicit after-effect, I cannot imagine where it can come in. Bridge players appear to me to be far too engrossed in bickering and fault-finding to worry about immorality and laxity.

You will pardon this apparent digression. “The Walls of Jericho” being a long, preachy and rather foolish tirade against a game of cards, my apparent digression is necessary. The success of the play with the pit and gallery in London shows that the game is popular with the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. Otherwise, these would fail to understand the second act, as—I candidly admit—I did.

In this act, various ladies of rank and title, including a duchess, are displayed in the act of playing bridge, in Lady Alethea Frobisher’s boudoir. They are all handsomely gowned, and exceedingly “bong tong,” but nothing happens at all. Mr. Sutro undoubtedly intends that the picture shall be extremely infamous, and prepare us for the subsequent rebellion of Lady Alethea’s nauseatingly right-minded husband. To my mind, Lady Alethea was but a weak and wishy-washy version of a certain Lady Teazle, and if Jericho could fall so easily there must have been Buddensiecks in those days. It deserved to fall.

I should like to come down to mere facts, but in “The Walls of Jericho” there are so few that they are scarcely worth mentioning. Viewed from the standpoint of one immune from the bridge germ, it is a dull and preachy succession of platitudes. Jack Frobisher, the righteous hero, has made his money in Queensland, with sheep. Perhaps that is why he baas through four acts. He is the husband of Alethea. They have a son. She is too absorbed in her “set” to pay much interest to the child, who—thank goodness!—does not appear.

In the third act Frobisher announces his intention of returning to Queensland and “nature,” and of taking her with him. Queensland, under any circumstances, must be horrible, but with such a prig as Mr. Sutro’s hero, it would be so loathsome that my sympathy was entirely with Lady Alethea, when, like a Laura Jean Libbey lady, she “drew herself up to her full height” and refused to go. In the last act she changed her mind, and went. Mr. Frobisher blew the trumpet, and the walls of Jericho fell. There is the play. As the comedian in the piece remarked—and it is the only phrase you carry away—“Jericho must have been jerry-built.”

Mr. Arthur Bourchier, who, I understand, is reveling in the fact that he “discovered” Mr. Alfred Sutro, played Frobisher. Mr. Bourchier is an actor-manager of much talk and self-importance. As the righteous husband of a butterfly wife, and the adoring father of an unseen brat, he was lacking in lightness and “sympathy.” The playwright’s point—always presuming that he had one—went hopelessly astray. Mr. Bourchier was a bore, rather than a bridge-pecked husband, and his preachiness was appallingly tedious, his delivery savoring of that supposed to be popular in the House of Commons. I could have slept through it; I think I did.

Miss Violet Vanbrugh, popular in London as the actor-manager’s wife, is a clever actress marred by mannerisms which would make her impossible outside of London. The affectation of her speech, the peculiarity of her stare and glare, give the casual spectator a curious sensation. There is a good deal of the freakish in her method; it is not natural, wholesome and universal. Yet beneath the surface one realizes that Miss Vanbrugh is an artist, who has evolved marvelously since New York saw her in a silly play called “The Queen’s Proctor.” The other puppets in this bridge bout included Miss Muriel Beaumont, a little ingÉnue who is charming; H. Nye Chart, Sydney Valentine, O.B. Clarence—one of the conventional senile bores—and Miss Lena Halliday.

Stamped as a London success—and the stamp is genuine—it will be curious to watch the fate of “The Walls of Jericho” in New York. Possibly Mr. Hackett may do more for it than Mr. Bourchier, for he has played so many inane heroes that one more cannot hurt him; but he will have to work very hard, and I do not envy him his job.

The second play I saw after my arrival in London was “What Pamela Wanted,” at the Criterion Theater. Of course I had no idea what Pamela did want. I had a vague notion what I, myself, wanted. It was a good play, and I’m sorry to say I didn’t get it, and the piece has since been withdrawn. It was a so-called comedy from the pen of Mme. Fred de Gresac—author of “The Marriage of Kitty”—and that weakest of French writers, Pierre Veber. These twain were done into London by Charles Brookfield.

Mme. de Gresac is an amusing Parisienne, who has played some merry tunes on the marriage theme. She is a bit flighty, according to our notions, and inclined to regard the wedding ring as a huge joke, but she is really humorous, and with a clever adapter has possibilities. We realized that fact when we saw “The Marriage of Kitty.” “What Pamela Wanted” was unfortunately used as a vehicle for Miss Ethel Irving, who—unlike Marie Tempest—was by no means ready to emerge from the slough of musical comedy. In an effort to make the piece fit Miss Irving, Mr. Brookfield failed to make it fit her public.

Pamela was introduced as a bread-and-butter miss, who, after a few moments’ talk with a strange young man, agreed to marry him, on the understanding that both should gang their ain gait. Pamela had just left school as she met the youth, and the character, translated into English, was not plausible enough to be funny. There must be plausibility before comedy can take root. The foolish husband, jealous of Pamela, and the badly drawn Pamela, jealous of the foolish husband, all leading up to a happy understanding, which was “what Pamela wanted,” left gaps in an evening’s entertainment.

The piece was eked out by conventionally stupid characters, including one of those nasty old fathers that our sense of propriety will not tolerate; the usual “dashing” young actress, a French maid, and a skittish widow. The only type that amused was a flabby dude, and this was funny only because it was so well played by Mr. Lennox Pawle. Miss Ethel Irving herself, so charming in musical comedy, was heavy, stodgy and uninteresting. As a “star,” she was so lacking in all essentials that she reminded me of New York rather than of London. She recalled my favorite “rushlights,” and I didn’t cross the Atlantic to sample them anew.