ABSTRACT
A performance of Love’s Labour’s Lost is a sort of entertainment to be valued rather for Shakespear’s sake than for its own. The Dramatic Students did not tempt many people into the St. James’s Theatre on the sultry afternoon of 2nd July by the experiment; and it is perhaps as well that they did not, for their efforts bore much the same relation to fine acting as the play does to Antony and Cleopatra. They failed not only in skill and finish, but in intelligence. Having gathered from their study of the play that they must all be very amusing and in desperately high spirits, they set to work to produce that effect by being obstreperous in action, and in speech full of the unnatural archness by which people with no sense of humor betray their deficiency when they desire to appear jocund. Though they devoutly believed the play a funny one, they did not see the joke themselves, and so, ill at ease in their merriment, forgot that dignity and grace may be presumed to have tempered the wit of the gentlemen of the Court of Navarre, and the vivacity of the ladies of the Court of France. In some scenes, consequently, the performance was like an Elizabethan version of High Life Below Stairs. I shall say nothing of the feminine parts, except that they were all unfortunately cast. The men were better. Mr. G.R. Foss as Boyet and Mr. Frank Evans as Holofernes were quite efficient; and Mr. Lugg as Costard, though as yet a raw actor and prone to overdo his business, enlivened the performance considerably by his fun and mimetic turn. He sang “When Icicles Hang by the Wall” with commendable spirit, and with the recklessness of a man who has got the tune on his ear and considers that it is the conductor’s business to keep the band with the singer, which poor Herr Schoening tried gallantly to do, with more or less success. Mr. Bernard Gould and Mr. de Cordova, as Biron and Armado, were next best; but they made very little of their large share of the best opportunities of the afternoon. Mr. Gould’s gaiety lacked dignity and variety: he swaggered restlessly, and frittered away all the music of his lines. His colleague looked Armado, but did not act him. Mr. de Cordova is always picturesque; but his elocution, correct as far as it goes, is monotonous; and the adaptability and subtlety which go to constitute that impersonative power which is the distinctive faculty of the actor are not at present apparent in him. His qualifications, so far, are those of an artist’s model: he has yet to make himself an actor.
