t.

To an author who has any feeling of his business there is a keen and
whimsical joy in divining and revealing a side of an actor's genius
overlooked before, and unsuspected even by the actor himself. When I
snatched Mr Louis Calvert from Shakespeare, and made him wear a frock
coat and silk hat on the stage for perhaps the first time in his life, I
do not think he expected in the least that his performance would enable
me to boast of his Tom Broadbent as a genuine stage classic. Mrs
Patrick Campbell was famous before I wrote for her, but not for playing
illiterate cockney flower-maidens. And in the case which is provoking me
to all these impertinences, I am quite sure that Miss Gertrude
Kingston, who first made her reputation as an impersonator of the most
delightfully feather-headed and inconsequent ingenues, thought me more
than usually mad when I persuaded her to play the Helen of Euripides,
and then launched her on a queenly career as Catherine of Russia.

It is not the whole truth that if we take care of the actors the plays
will take care of themselves; nor is it any truer that if we take care
of the plays the actors will take care of themselves. There is both give
and take in the business. I have seen plays written for actors that made
me exclaim, "How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes deeds ill
done!" But Burbage may have flourished the prompt copy of Hamlet under
Shakespeare's nose at the tenth rehearsal and cried, "How oft the sight
of means to do great deeds makes playwrights great!" I say the tenth
because I am convinced that at the first he denounced his part as a
rotten one; thought the ghost's speech ridiculously long; and wanted to
play the king. Anyhow, whether he had the wit to utter it or not, the
boast would have been a valid one. The best conclusion is that every
actor should say, "If I create the hero in myself, God will send an
author to write his part." For in the long run the actors will get the
authors, and the authors the actors, they deserve.

Great Catherine was performed for the first time at the Vaudeville
Theatre in London on the 18th November 1913, with Gertrude Kingston as
Catherine, Miriam Lewes as Yarinka, Dorothy Massingham as Claire, Norman
McKinnell as Patiomkin, Edmond Breon as Edstaston, Annie Hill as the
Princess Dashkoff, and Eugene Mayeur and F. Cooke Beresford as Naryshkin
and the Sergeant.

GREAT CATHERINE

THE FIRST SCENE

1776. Patiomkin in