Dumas felt the play and the performances provided him "what I was searching for, what I lacked, what I had to find – actors forgetting they were on stage actual speech and gesture such as made actors creatures of God, with their own virtues, passions and weaknesses, not wooden, impossible heroes booming sonorous platitudes". The journal Pandore wrote about "that English candour which allows everything to be expressed and everything to be depicted, and for which nothing in nature is unworthy of imitation by drama". The moment in the Play Scene when Claudius rises up and interrupts the proceedings, then rushes from the stage, provoked a long and enthusiastic ovation. But Hamlet's interaction with the ghost of his father, the play-within-the-play, Hamlet's conflict with his mother, Ophelia's mad scene, and the scene with the gravediggers were all found to be amazing and powerful. The large number of corpses on the stage in the final scene was found by many to be laughable. The supporting players were conceded to be weak. Not everything about the performance or the play was considered convincing. (The actress's Irish accent and the lack of power in her voice had hindered her success in London.) It wasn't long before new clothing and hair styles, à la mode d'Ophélie and modeled on those of the actress, became all the rage in Paris. I recognized the meaning of dramatic grandeur, beauty, truth." Even the wife of the English ambassador, Lady Granville, felt compelled to report that the Parisians "roar over Miss Smithson's Ophelia, and strange to say so did I". The French composer Hector Berlioz was also present at that opening night performance and later wrote: "The lightning flash of that sublime discovery opened before me at a stroke the whole heaven of art, illuminating it to its remotest depths. Her performances produced an extraordinary reaction: men wept openly in the theater, and when they left were "convulsed by uncontrollable emotion." The twenty-five-year-old Alexandre Dumas, père, who was about to embark on a major career as a novelist and dramatist, was in the audience and found the performance revelatory, "far surpassing all my expectations". Her mad scene appeared to owe little to tradition and seemed almost like an improvisation, with several contemporary accounts remarking on her astonishing capacity for mime.
0 kommentar(er)
