Beautiful Speech

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 140, 3 September 1927, Page 22

Beautiful Speech

i LONDON ACTRESSES RE- | | PLY TO MRS. PATRICK j CAMPBELL ! i _ I I ! PLAYS, NOT THE PLAYERS ; Leading London actresses have 1 been taking sides in a controversy about stage dress and diction of the day. The discussion was begun by Mrs. Patrick Campbell, some of r whose remarks were published in this page last Saturday. Beautiful speech, she said, should express a habit of mind: and it was c the first and most valuable weapon 1 in the actor’s armoury. Without die- r tion, an actor’s appearance, his panto- t mime, and his tricks —which should be j £ his servants—became his masters. She 1 gave her hearers a real treat by illus- 1 trating her point with speeches in the ? persons of Paula Tanqueray, Magda, i Melisande, Juliet and Eliza Doolittle. 1 Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s opinions £ were commented upon by several of the c best-known actresses of to-day. Miss Fay Compton said: —“I agree 1 with Mrs. Patrick Campbell in saying that the plays of to-day are not writ- i ten for fineness or for beauty of lan- j 1 guage, but I think her remark that it I is hard for a girl to be passionate on < the stage in modern clothes is simply j j nonsensical. It is the plays and not ! ; the players that are lacking to-day. We 1 '■ have hundreds of good actors and actresses, but they are not given a fair chance because there is such a dearth < of good plays.”

Miss Madge Titheradge said: “We must move with the times. If we appeared to-day in the ‘hired tea gowns* and uttered our lines with the ‘passionate diction' that Mrs Campbell says is gone, wer should play to empty theatres. We give the public what it demands. There is no demand for romance in the theatre now, or for the picturesque sort of plays, in which Mrs. Campbell was so wonderful It’s not the fault of the actors and actresses that that has gone; it is the public’s fault. One cannot speak in the beautiful, passionate voice of great romantic plays and classic tragedy when one’s lines are the crisp and comic lines of a light farce. We have to adapt our voices to our lines.” “I think the stage to-day, as a whole, is much more natural than it was in the days Mrs. Campbell has in mind,” Miss Heather Thatcher said, “but I quite agree that we all need to take great pains with our diction. We have a tendency to clip our words and speak too fast. That, to some extent, jis due to the fact that our lines are more conversational to-day and less oratori'.-;i 1. In Mrs. Campbell's day i parts were more theatrical.”