(2 of 4)
The New York World: "It is easy to use superlatives. One who saw the play at the National [Theatre] last night might use them all with justice."
Duse. It is said that the actor's fame is the most fleeting of all earthly glory. Though this be true, there are surely exalted souls in Heaven who would trade musty volumes of their memories for the greeting accorded to Eleonora Duse,* 64, and still much alive, at her "American appearance after 20 years" at the Metropolitan Opera House, Manhattan. The great auditorium, crowded literally to the chandeliers, roared its united respect and admiration till the golden rafters rang. Duse, the greatest living actress, was accorded honor as majestic as it was sincere.
Mme. Duse opened her brief repertory with La Donna del Mare (" The Lady from the Sea") by Henrik Ibsen. She played it in Italian.
Probably nine-tenths of the audience had never seen Duse. When first she came along the little garden path at the foot of the towering painted mountains her appearance was startlingly unusual. A slight woman, her hair white, without a speck of make-up to conceal the wrinkles. Her clothes strangely simple. Her movements decisive, restrained and yet assured. Her hands, once the toast of all Europe, still stirring with their nervous eloquence. Her voice small, curiously musical.
And then the play.
The Lady from the Sea is considered by critics one of the lesser works of Ibsen. It centers entirely on the character of Ellida which has " suffered a sea change" through years of lonely residence in a lighthouse. She is distant, disturbing, detached. Into her early life there had come a wandering sailor who had taken her heart away with him upon his travels. Thinking him drowned, she had married a stuffy country doctor. The sailor returns.
Obviously the action of the play is largely psychological. Without Ital- ian much of this drama must necessarily drown, like Ellida's sailor, among the waves of unfriendly verbs and consonants. But for the performance of the great tragedienne, the production would be worse than worthless.
Yet even the barriers of an unfamiliar tongue are broken by the uncanny force of Duse's personality. She might have been reciting passages from an Italian dictionary for all the audience cared. She held them breathless through four long acts of conversation unrelieved.
Alexander Woollcott: "Her performance of Ellida Wangel was among the few truly beautiful and exhilarating things which we have seen in our time."
John Corbin: " The voice of a silver twilight peopling an atmosphere Corot might have imagined with multitudinous accents of the human spirit."
Percy Hammond: "What she does and what she seems to be are unimportant so long as she is what she is."
Suppression of Vice