LITTLE THEATRE

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 288, 25 February 1928, Page 22

LITTLE THEATRE

SOCIETY’S “AT HOME” As the Town Hall is the only building in Auckland which can possibly hold all the members of the Auckland Little Theatre Society, it has been engaged for Tuesday night’s “At Home.” The guests will be received by the chairman (Mr. L. P. Leary) and Mrs. Leary. Miss Peggy Hover and Mr. Jim Swan, who appeared so successfully last year in Barrie’s “The Old Lady Shows Her Medals” will again make their appearance in what is generally considered to be one of the finest of the Little Theatre’s productions to date. “If,” by Lord Dunsany, the next production, will be staged on March 28. y* * # and last, but surely not least, as one Jenny O’Jones in a play called “Red Letter Nights,” one of the many adaptations from the German to which Augustin Daly condemned his leading lady. As literature, even of the dramatic order, “Red Letter Nights” was simply beneath contempt; but there was a scene in it which remains a rich memory. It was that in which the principal character, a high-spirited girl, who had been ordered against her will to marry an unpleasing old man, got rid of him by posing as a slatternly hoyden, and dancing into his presence with a song about Jenny O’Jones, which she described as having a hundred verses, all of them equally bad. How she sang and danced that song, with what a mingled commonness and prettiness every glance and tone was charged, and how it convulsed the audience—-here again one can only lay down one’s pen in helplessness. It is the old story' of the death of the player’s art as the last touch of it dies away. If one were to quote the dialogue of that scene, or the

song, the reader would only shiver; yet when Ada Rehan spoke and sang them they glowed with life. Adorable, gifted, proud, broken-hearted Ada Rehan! Surely as long as Daly’s stands some £cho of her genius will hover in its spaces! Sara Bernhardt at Her Best One more night I recall from those far-off years—a Saturday. The play was Sardou’s “Fedora,” the actress Sara Bernhardt, then also at the height of her extraordinary powers. The theatre was packed, and it happened to be one of those nights when the actress was, as they say, at the very top of her form. In scene after scene she gave us of her best, and the whole evening was a crescendo of excitement. The intervals between the acts were mercifully long—the spectator really needed time in which to recover from storm after storm of emotion—and the curtain did not finally fall until close upon midnight. Then followed such a scene as I have never witnessed oefore or since. The whole audience stood waving hats and handkerchiefs and cheering in a roar that never ceased until the actress, herself almost fainting at the end, had reappeared 17 times. Amd once more the spectral doubt intrudes—how can a mere written memory convey anything of reality to the reader who was not present at such a scene? So also with the triumphs of Daly’s in its musical years—Marie Tempest’s in “The Geisha,” George Graves’s in “The Little Michus,” Rutland Barrington’s in “San Toy,” Lily Elsie’s in “The Merry Widow,” and many more. One can still see and hear them; still enjoy their grace or their comicality; still “in the mind’s eye” see George Graves in that scene in “The Little Michus” in which, in the character of an old general, he was offered a glass of home-made wine which had such a ‘bite” in it that it dislocated his false teeth ; still hear the sounds, and see the grimaces he made, causing a laughter became almost a pain, and really leaving the audience at last almost afraid to look at him. Such are a few of the memories wmch the news of this theatre’s reversion to non-musical drama evokes Let us hope that history here as elsewhere Z'ljl repe . at herself, and that playgoers may again see something of the genius which glowed there so often in the