United States or Afghanistan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Among his most successful farces are The Magistrate , The School Mistress , and The Amazons . Clever invention of absurd situations and success in starting infectious laughter are the prime qualities of these plays. The Second Mrs. Tanqueray is by most critics considered Pinero's masterpiece.
If the theatre in America is weak, what it needs is not endowment: it needs great and popular plays. Why should we waste our money and our energy trying to make the crowd come to see The Master Builder, or A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, or The Hour Glass, or Pélléas and Mélisande? It is willing enough to come without urging to see Othello and The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.
Tanqueray at home, and at the same time have introduced us more at large to the characters of Aubrey and Ellean; or he might have depicted for us one of the previous associations of Paula Ray might perhaps have let us see her "keeping house" with Hugh Ardale. But either of these openings would have been disproportionate and superfluous.
And so, by a kind of naïveté in the acceptance of emotion for all it might be, instead of for the little that it is, by an almost perverse simplicity and sincerity in the treatment of a superficial and insincere character, Duse plays "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray" in the grand manner, destroying the illusion of the play as she proves over again the supremacy of her own genius.
An action with a gap of twenty years in it may be all very well in melodrama or romance, but scarcely in higher and more serious types of drama. Especially is it to be desired that interest should be concentrated on one set of characters, and should not be frittered away on subsidiary or preliminary personages. Take, for instance, the case of The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.
There is a scene in which the blood fades out of her cheeks until they seem to turn to dry earth furrowed with wrinkles. When it is all over, and we think of the Silvia of "La Gioconda," of the woman we divine under Magda and under Paula Tanqueray, it is with a certain sense of waste; for even Paula can be made to seem something which Fédora can never be made to seem.
English players do not represent certain foreign characters as well as do the foreigners. Is this surprising? They are handicapped, obviously. How often have we seen a French, German or Italian performance of an English play concerning English people? Was the great Eleonora as painfully truthful as Mrs Patrick Campbell in The Second Mrs Tanqueray?
Not one of the plays which she has brought with her is a play on the level of her intelligence and of her capacity for expressing deep human emotion. Take "The Second Mrs. Tanqueray." It is a very able play, it is quite an interesting glimpse into a particular kind of character, but it is only able, and it is only a glimpse. Paula, as conceived by Mr.
The fact is simply that the characters are not large enough, true enough, living enough that the play does not probe deep enough into human experience to make the august intervention of death seem other than an incongruity. The suicide of Paula Tanqueray, though it, too, has been much criticized, is a very different matter.
The tender apple-blossom, rather than Pretence, is surely a reminder of Eden and the fall of love's devotion into inflated worldliness. The poppy which flaunts its violent colours athwart the bearded corn, and which frets and withers like the Second Mrs. Tanqueray so soon as you bring it to the shelter of a decent home, is made the symbol of Repose.
Word Of The Day