The scenery and costumes were excellent, as indeed they always are at the Lyceum when the piece is produced under Mr. Irving’s direction.  The first scene was really very beautiful, and quite as good as the famous cherry orchard of the Theatre Francais.  A critic who posed as an authority on field sports assured me that no one ever went out hunting when roses were in full bloom.  Personally, that is exactly the season I would select for the chase, but then I know more about flowers than I do about foxes, and like them much better.  If the critic was right, either the roses must wither or Squire Thornhill must change his coat.  A more serious objection may be brought against the division of the last act into three scenes.  There, I think, there was a distinct dramatic loss.  The room to which Olivia returns should have been exactly the same room she had left.  As a picture of the eighteenth century, however, the whole production was admirable, and the details, both of acting and of mise-en-scene, wonderfully perfect.  I wish Olivia would take off her pretty mittens when her fortune is being told.  Cheiromancy is a science which deals almost entirely with the lines on the palm of the hand, and mittens would seriously interfere with its mysticism.  Still, when all is said, how easily does this lovely play, this artistic presentation, survive criticisms founded on cheiromancy and cub-hunting!  The Lyceum under Mr. Irving’s management has become a centre of art.  We are all of us in his debt.  I trust that we may see some more plays by living dramatists produced at his theatre, for Olivia has been exquisitely mounted and exquisitely played.

AS YOU LIKE IT AT COOMBE HOUSE

(Dramatic Review, June 6, 1885.)

In Theophile Gautier’s first novel, that golden book of spirit and sense, that holy writ of beauty, there is a most fascinating account of an amateur performance of As You Like It in the large orangery of a French country house.  Yet, lovely as Gautier’s description is, the real presentation of the play last week at Coombe seemed to me lovelier still, for not merely were there present in it all those elements of poetry and picturesqueness which le maitre impeccable so desired, but to them was added also the exquisite charm of the open woodland and the delightful freedom of the open air.  Nor indeed could the Pastoral Players have made a more fortunate selection of a play.  A tragedy under the same conditions would have been impossible.  For tragedy is the exaggeration of the individual, and nature thinks nothing of dwarfing a hero by a holly bush, and reducing a heroine to a mere effect of colour.  The subtleties also of facial expression are in the open air almost entirely lost; and while this would be a serious defect in the presentation of a play which deals immediately with psychology, in the case of a comedy, where the situations predominate over the characters, we do not feel it nearly so much; and Shakespeare himself seems to have clearly recognised this difference, for while he had Hamlet and Macbeth always played by artificial light he acted As You Like It and the rest of his comedies en plein jour.