FIFTY YEARS ON THE STAGE

Radio Record, Volume VIII, Issue 20, 30 November 1934, Page 12

FIFTY YEARS ON THE STAGE

Marie Tempest, England’: Greatest Comedienne Miss Marie Tempest, probably the most famous of: English actresses, celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of her first London stage appearance shortly. It is forty-seven years since she played the leading part in "Dorothy" at the Adelphi-this year.she came back to the Adelphi in another role, still the leading one. Below is reprinted a short essay on Miss Tempest by James Agate. . NY estimate of Miss Tempest’s genius must be based on her essential quality as an actress, with which is bound up the power to resist the passing of the years and the changing of fashions, An actress who has been the rage of London for a twelvemonth or less may not have. abiding genius but only a flash-in-the-pan talent. The delightful lady we celebrate here has been a great artist for as long as all of us can remember, At the present time she is playing the leading part at the Lyric, and at this moment is on the stage of the very theatre at which she was playing leading-lady forty-five years ago-a record which no other living English actress can begin to approach. The play was the comic opera, "Dorothy," and for some time after this Miss Tempest appeared almost. entirely in opera, singing the leading roles of Carmen, Manon, and Mignon. In 1899° Miss Tempest severed her connection with musical plays, I think because the management wanted her to appear with one knickerbocker turned up! Mary-as her friends call herthought this was "infra dig,’ and the result was one of the biggest storms in a teacup that can ever have occurred. The loss to the musical stage was the legitimate theatre’s immediate gain, for Miss Tempest straightWay proceeded to triumph as Nell Gwynne, as Peg Woffington, as Becky Sharp, and as Polly Eccles, And I have to say that any actress who can ‘succeed in those four parts must be a comedienne of the very first class. In watching Miss Tempest. play you must all have sensed that she possesses a quality which has almost vanished from the Wnglish stage-the quality of breeding. This quality is as hard to define as it is easy to perceive. No sensitive person has ever failed to remark it, though none has ever been able to say exactly what it is. Instinctively you know quality iu a racehorse, a piece of jewellery, and in what used to be called a fine lady. It is the royalty of art, and in the art of the theatre its last repository is Marie Tempest.