DEAF AND BLIND DRAMATIST.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 231, 4 February 1911, Page 10

DEAF AND BLIND DRAMATIST.

REMARKABLE STAGE SUCCESS OF A GIRL. WIT AND WISDOM. Paris, December 12. A new play by an unknown author—a girl who is stone deaf and nearly blindwas produced at Odeoii Theatre on Saturday.* It is tailed Emancipation," and was of a series of rc]>ertopre plays pro/i'u<,,ed by if. Antone much on th.o wine, .system as that of Mr. Froh(»au,'s vepertoire tlieatre in London. Tt is wonderfully interesting, and the ai.u(ienye, which was first deeply niov..||. lie'., ciime wildly Piithu.swstie.

The t.lav is the Story Q f u p],;)^,,,,],,,. who, living an ausUre life himself, had preached a doctrine scattering the. ordinary morals on which ordinary live* are lived. To him come his sister and another girl who have been expelled from a convent. y The younger girl is one of the philosopher's disciples. She has read all his works, and she admires him and his teaching, though she has never seen liim. They work together, read together, and although tlicre is a great difl'erenee in their years, they fall in love with one another.

\Miat is to be done? The philosopher declares that they should unite to get the best from life, than can be «ot, (hough he liimself is a married man.' The girl will not, and she goes back to the convent, although the man pleads that sacrifice is the worst form of selfishnesg.

The play is quite unusual, the situations are dramatic, and the dialogue is amazingly brilliant. As the curtain fell •m each succeeding act the applause grew louder, and when the plav ended" I lie audience rose and shouted for the author. This is the most unusual thing in Paris During twelve years of hard theatregong I only remember to have seen it once.

DID NOT HEAR THE APPLAUSE. The author was brought forward, bowed, and disappeared. | She is a <nrl of twenty-five—Mile. Leneru. And "she is deaf—stone deaf. She had not heard a line of her play; she had not heard the loud applause. And she could fust seethat was all.

Mile. Mencru lives with her mother in a little pension in Passv. She speaks quietly, breathlessly, without rhvthm, jerkily, as deaf people speak. Her eyes are extremely weak, but they are pretty fives, and she can see a little.

Her father was a captain in the French navy, but he is dead. Until she was fourteen she was a child like other children—:ici;r«r particularly clever nor particularly stupid, her mother says. She played as other children play ,and wrote her exercises for school—nothing else. And then, when she was fourteen, she got typhoid fever. While she was eon-valc-cent her ears began to buzz and her eyes became veiled with a kind of cataract. Her mother took her from one specialist to another. The eye specialists gave some slight hope; the ear doctors gave none at all. And the poor mother, feverishly anxious that her daughter should not be cut off from all human intercourse, set to work and learned the deaf and dumb alphabet, speaking it to her daughter Marie as she learned it herself.

The eyes wore saved—pist saved. But one morning Mme Leneru woke up to hear a terrible storm raging. Lightning flashed, thunder crashed, and on the roof nf the little garret room in which mother and daughter were the hail came rattlinc down. • h

"Listen, Marie," the mother said' 'listen to the storm." Put Marie did not hear it. She was stone deaf. WITHOUT FRIENDS. Her deafness prevented her from having friends Children are pitiless to suffering. Hut she read, and she worked. She learne.. English and German and Latm. She read every book that she could get hold of. and one .dnv the brain which her infirmity had fettered with the bonds of silence, found an outlet on paper. Marie Leneru began to write. She wrote, she says herself, with the eagerness with which a starving man swallows food. She wrote as a person would apeak- who had been forced to silence for weeks. Her ideas rushed to the paper like the torrent of a river in spate, carrying all before them until thev reached the sea of success.

T'jvo years ago she published her first, hook, "St. Just." On Saturday her first play was produced. For such' a girl the hooks and plays she write., fall little short of miraculous. Remember that this girl of twenty-five has been dentsince she was a child.

She knows the word "love" when it is spelled out on the fingers, but she has never heard it a* a woman hears it. And yet her scenes of passion in "Emailcipation were her finest scenes She lias written three other plavs and her success on Saturday has frightened her. For many of the critics, writing of her works and having heard-with the exaggeration which flies about a theatre -that the author was deaf, dumb, blind and a cripple, wrote of the curious kinship between insanity and genius. That Marie Leneru has genius was clear to everybody, but the words insanity, crinple and the like appeared so often'in the articles which pmised her play that the poor girl suffered horror from her triumph, and a doctor had to he called in. •She is much better now, Although her mother watches over her jealously to prevent every excitement.

STORY OF THE REHEARSALS Mnie Lcneru's dmy of the rehea'r.al of her daughter's play is one of the most pathetic tales T have ever heard "She knows it all by heart, fnom the first line to the final curtain," said Vme I*ner„ ««T did not bike her to ?ne" .ailiest rehearsals; they would have torured her too much. Poor child, .she knows nothing about the stage, and I do not know more than she does. How eoiiW I explain to her that the actor aid actresses were groping their way with the text, and that thev would Jt diflerenlywlu.n they became oonversaS l-n V, \ h " ]t sfio,ns "- llwiißli the '•1"1;! ofher brain must spnng all ,4 •' mnde,nto,ife o , l( , 1(ls(iC( ,.P l][ > < ] see it so might have killed ]„>,- "So T waited until the last' few rehcarsa e, and she followed these with fhe Jo strong glasses. She watched < lips and gestures of everybody on the stage, and every now and tlicnVh'e,, .],, saw something that she thought was wrong she interrupted. That wa. the "-t pathetic thin, of „1, Pn <nM./htcr remembers how ,„„,,,,,. s|l( , »lio has 11CVW heard either herself or ;"f;;'v «■'*' «li«l ««t know when she was trying to explain how (his or (hat scene ,ho,,M I>'«.vc . (hot her voice- high-pi c! h' t; r "° ~IM :,t nn " f *"-"

,1 lov ,l,e poor child suffered at, >t poHnrmance! She looked about ["■ lymlly knowing whether to "'"/■<> '" sin,?,. ,„■ (he audience. Re""■mljer that she heard nothing, and th„. she. did not know unless lhpv ~,,,,, 1 ";."' h«n«lH. whether the audience were delighted or ju.st the reverse \j (•„. end ot one scene „ roar „f admiration lose before fh, iunlh.nee began to clap. iney are hooting me. mother.'" she sun . and when the final eurtain fell f told her that thev were excitedly applauding. •Yes,' she said, -but it i's lr e the hailstorm long ago. I cannot hear them.'"