Critical Essay | Critical Essay by J. C. Trewin

Critical Essay by J. C. Trewin

SOURCE: "Bernhardt on the London Stage," in Bernhardt and the Theatre of Her Time, edited by Eric Salmon, Greenwood Press, 1984, pp. 111-31.

In the following essay, Trewin discusses London's reaction to Bernhardt and her reaction to the city.

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I would like to move selectively across Sarah's visits to a city that—in spite of Bernard Shaw—she loved; and midway, to unveil (for a moment only) a personal King Charles's Head.

May I begin by dropping into poetry?—not my own, but that of the nearly forgotten Stephen Phillips, dramatist of the golden shuttle and the violet wool, the dreaming keels of Greece, the souls that flashed together in one flame. The year was 1912. Sarah Bernhardt, aged sixty-five, was appearing at—of all theatres—the London Coliseum, today an opera house, then the most celebrated music-hall in Britain. Hardly, I would say, a citadel of the classical stage—though that may not have troubled...
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