GEORGE SHAW - The Complete Works

The performance made amends to her for the rehearsal. The tragedian surpassed himself; and Madge was compelled to admire him, although he was in his fiftieth year and personally disagreeable to her. For her delivery of the soliloquy following her scene with him, she received, as her share of the enthusiasm he had excited, a round of applause which gratified her the more because she had no suspicion that he bad earned the best part of it. The scene of Ophelia’s madness was listened to with favor by the audience, who were impressed by the intensely earnest air which nervousness gave Madge, as well as by her good looks.

Next day she had leisure to study the part of Lady Anne in Cibber’s adaptation of “Richard III,” which was rehearsed on the Wednesday; and this time the tragedian was so overbearing, and corrected her so frequently and savagely, that when he handed her his sword, and requested her to stab him, she felt disposed to take him at his word. In the scene from Richard’s domestic life in which he informs his wife that he hates her, he not only spoke the text with a cold ferocity which chilled her, but cursed at her under his breath quite outrageously. At last she was stung to express her resentment by an indignant look, which fell immediately before his frown. When the rehearsal, which, though incomplete, lasted from eleven to four, was over, Madge was angry and very tired. As she was leaving, she passed near Richard, who was conversing graciously with the manager and one of the actors. The night before, he had threatened to leave the theatre because the one had curtailed his stage escort by two men; and he had accused the other of intentionally insulting him by appearing on the stage without spurs.

“Who is that little girl?” he said aloud, pointing to Madge.

The manager, surprised at the question, made some reply which did not reach her, his voice and utterance being less sonorous and distinct than the tragedian’s.

“Unquestionably she has played with me. I am aware of that. What is she called?”

The manager told him.

“Come here” he said to Madge, in his grand manner. She reddened and stopped.

“Come here,” he repeated, more emphatically. She was too inexperienced to feel sure of her right to be treated more respectfully, so she approached him slowly.

Who taught you to speak?

“A gentleman in London,” she said, coldly. “A Mr Jack.”

“Jack:” The tragedian paused. “Jack!” he repeated. Then, with a smile, and a graceful action of his wrists, “I never heard of him.” The other men laughed. “Would you like to tour through the provinces with me — to act with me every night?”

“Oho!”said the manager, jocularly, “I shall have something to say to that. I cannot afford to lose her.”

“You need not be alarmed,” said Madge, all her irritation suddenly exploding in one angry splutter. “I have not the slightest intention of breaking my present engagement, particularly now, when the most unpleasant part of it is nearly over.” And she walked away, pouting and scarlet. The manager told her next day that she had ruined herself, and had made a very ungrateful return for the kindness that she, a beginner, had received from the greatest actor on the stage. She replied that she was not conscious of having received anything but rudeness from the greatest actor on the stage, and that if she had offended him she was very glad. The manager shook his head and retired, muttering that a week’s leading business had turned her head. The tragedian, who had been, for so terrible a person, much wounded and put out of heart by her attack, took no further notice of her, demanding no fresh rehearsal of Ophelia, and only giving her a few curt orders in the small part of Marion Delorme. At last he departed from Nottingham; and Madge, for the first time since his arrival, lay down to sleep free from care.

Her next part was that of a peasant girl in an Irish melodrama. She looked very pretty in her Connemara cloak and short skirt, but was hampered by her stage brogue, which only made her accent aggressively English. During this period, she was annoyed by the constant attendance in the stalls of a young gentleman who flung bouquets to her; followed her to her lodging; and finally wrote her a letter in which he called her a fairy Red Riding Hood, describing his position and prospects, and begging her to marry him. Madge after some hesitation as to the advisability of noticing this appeal, replied by a note declining his offer, and requesting him to discontinue his gifts of flowers, which, she said, were a source of embarrassment, and not of pleasure, to her. After this, the young gentleman instead of applauding, as before, sat in his stall with folded arms and a gloomy expression. Madge, who was by this time sufficiently accustomed to the stage to recognize faces in the audience, took care not to look at him; and so, after a week, he ceased to attend and saw him no more.

The Irish melodrama passed on to the next town; and an English opera company came in its place for a fortnight, during which Madge found the time hung heavy on her hands, as she took no part in the performances, though she went to the theatre daily from habit. She was glad when she was at work again in a modern play with which a popular actress was making the tour of the provinces. This actress was an amiable woman; and Madge enacted Celia in As You Like It at her benefit without any revival of the dread of Shakespeare which the tragedian had implanted in her. She was now beginning to tread the boards with familiar ease. At first, the necessity of falling punctually into prearranged positions on the stage and of making her exits and entrances at prescribed sides, had so preoccupied her that all freedom of attention or identification of herself with the character she represented had been impossible. To go through her set task of speeches and man oeuvres with accuracy was the most she could hope to do. Now, however, there mechanical conditions of her art not only ceased to distract her, but enabled her to form plans of acting which stood the test of rehearsal. She became used to learning parts, not from a book of the play, but from a mere list of the fragments which she had to utter; so that she committed her lines to memory first, and found out what they were about afterwards. She was what is called by actors a quick study; and in Nottingham, where, besides the principal piece, one and often two farces were performed nightly, she had no lack of practice. In four months, she was second in skill only to the low comedian and the old woman, and decidedly superior to the rest of the stock company, most of whom had neither natural talent nor even taste for the stage, and only earned their livelihood on it because, their parents having been in the profession, they had been in a manner born into it.

Madge’s artistic experience thenceforth was varied, though her daily course was monotonous. Other tragedians came to Nottingham, but none nearly so terrible, nor, she reluctantly confessed, nearly so gifted as he who had taught her the scene from Hamlet. Some of them, indeed, objected to the trouble of rehearsing, and sent substitutes who imitated them in every movement and so drilled the company to act with them. Occasionally a part in a comedy of contemporary life enabled Madge to profit by her knowledge of fashionable society and her taste in modern dress. The next week, perhaps, she would have to act in a sensational melodrama, and, in a white muslin robe, to struggle in the arms of a pickpocket in corduroys, with his clothes and hands elaborately begrimed. Once she had to play with the wreck of a celebrated actress, who was never free from the effects of brandy, and who astonished Madge by walking steadily on the stage when she could hardly stand off it. Then Shakespeare, sensation drama, Irish melodrama, comic opera or pantomime, new comedy from London over again, with farce constantly. Study, rehearsal, and performance became part of her daily habits. Her old enthusiasm for the mock passions the stage left her, and was succeeded by a desire to increase her skill in speaking by acquiring as much resource in shades of meaning as Jack had given her in pure pronunciation, and to add as many effective gestures as possible to the stock she had already learnt. When she was not engaged at the theatre she was at her lodging, practicing the management of a train, trying to acquire the knack of disposing her dress prettily in the act of sitting down, or arranging her features into various expressions before a mirror. This last branch of her craft was the most troublesome to her. She had learned from Jack, much to her surprise, that she could not make her face express anger or scorn by merely feeling angry or scornful. The result of that method was a strained frown, disagreeable to behold; and it was long before she attained perfect control of her features, and artistic judgment in exercising it. Sometimes she erred on the side of exaggeration, and failed to conceal the effort which her studied acting required. Then she recoiled into tameness and conventionality. Then, waking from this, she tried a modification of her former manner, and presently became dissatisfied with that too, and re-modified it. Not until she had gone through two years of hard study and practice did she find herself mistress of a fairly complete method; and then indeed she felt herself an actress. She ridiculed the notion that emotion had anything to do with her art, and seriously began to think of taking a pupil, feeling that she could make an actress of any girl, the matter being merely one of training. When she had been some four months in this phase, she had a love affair with a young acting manager of a touring company. The immediate effect was to open her eyes to the fact that the people were tired of her complete method, and that she was tired of it too. She flung it at once to the winds for ever, and thenceforth greatly undervalued her obligations to the study it had cost her, declaring, in the teeth of her former opinion, that study and training were useless, and that the true method was to cultivate the heart and mind and let the acting take care of itself. She cultivated her mind by high reading and high thinking as far as she could. As to the cultivation of her heart, the acting manager taught her that the secret of that art was love. Now it happened that the acting manager, though pleasant-looking and goodnatured, was by no means clever, provident, or capable of resisting temptation. Madge never could make up her mind whether he had entangled her or she him. In truth love entangled them both; and Madge found that love suited her excellently. It improved her health; it enlarged her knowledge of herself and of the world; it explained her roles to her, thawed the springs of emotion that had never flowed freely before either on or off the stage, threw down a barrier that had fenced her in from her kind, and replaced her vague aspirations, tremors, doubts, and fits of low spirits with an elate enjoyment in which she felt that she was a woman at last. Nevertheless, her attachment to the unconscious instrument of this mysterious change proved transient. The acting manager had but slender intellectual resources: when his courtship grew stale, he became a bore. After a while, their professional engagements carried them asunder; and as a correspondent he soon broke down. Madge, did not feel the parting: she found a certain delight in being fancy-free; and before that was exhausted she was already dreaming of a new lover, an innocent young English-opera librettist, whom she infatuated and ensnared and who came nearer than she suspected to blowing out his brains from remorse at having, as he thought, ensnared her. His love for her was abject in its devotion; but at last she went elsewhere and, as her letters also presently ceased, his parents, with much trouble, managed to convince him at last that no she no longer cared for him.