. Is the play weak?
He tries to strengthen it, poor thing, by sending it out walking for its
health.

If we take drama with any seriousness, as an art as well as an
improvisation, we shall realise that one of its main requirements is
that it should make pictures. That is the lesson of Bayreuth, and when
one comes away, the impression which remains, almost longer than the
impression of the music itself, is that grave, regulated motion of the
actors. As I have said elsewhere, no actor makes a gesture which has not
been regulated for him; there is none of that unintelligent haphazard
known as being "natural"; these people move like music, or with that
sense of motion which it is the business of painting to arrest. But
here, of course, I am speaking of the poetic drama, of drama which does
not aim at the realistic representation of modern life. Maeterlinck
should be acted in this solemn way, in a kind of convention; but I admit
that you cannot act Ibsen in quite the same way.

The other day, when Mme. Jeanne Granier's company came over here to give
us some lessons in acting, I watched a little scene in "La Veine," which
was one of the telling scenes of the play: Guitry and Brasseur standing
face to face for some minutes, looking at their watches, and then
waiting, each with a single, fixed expression on his face, in which the
whole temperament of each is summed up. One is inclined to say: No
English actor could have done it. Perhaps; but then, no English
stage-manager would have let them do it. They would have been told to
move, to find "business," to indulge in gesture which would not come
naturally to them. Again, in "Tartuffe," when, at the end, the hypocrite
is exposed and led off to prison, Coquelin simply turns his back on the
audience, and stands, with head sullenly down, making no movement; then,
at the end, he turns half-round and walks straight off, on the nearer
side of the stage, giving you no more than a momentary glimpse of a
convulsed face, fixed into a definite, gross, raging mood. It would have
taken Mr. Tree five minutes to get off the stage, and he would have
walked to and fro with a very multiplication of gesture, trying on one
face, so to speak, after another. Would it have been so effective, that
is to say, so real?

A great part of the art of French acting consists in knowing when and
how not to do things. Their blood helps them, for there is movement in
their blood, and they have something to rest