We Discuss the Performance.--A Marvellous Piece of Workmanship.--The Adam Family.--Some Living Groups.--The Chief Performers.--A Good Man, but a Bad Judas.--Where the Histrionic Artist Grows Wild.--An Alarm!
"And what do you think of the performance AS a performance?" asks B.
"Oh, as to that," I reply, "I think what everyone who has seen the play must think, that it is a marvellous piece of workmanship.
"Experienced professional stage-managers, with all the tricks and methods of the theatre at their fingers' ends, find it impossible, out of a body of men and women born and bred in the atmosphere of the playhouse, to construct a crowd that looks like anything else except a nervous group of broken-down paupers waiting for soup.
"At Ober-Ammergau a few village priests and representative householders, who have probably never, any one of them, been inside the walls of a theatre in their lives, dealing with peasants who have walked straight upon the stage from their carving benches and milking-stools, produce swaying multitudes and clamouring mobs and dignified assemblages, so natural and truthful, so realistic of the originals they represent, that you feel you want to leap upon the stage and strangle them.
"It shows that earnestness and effort can very easily overtake and pass mere training and technical skill. The object of the Ober-Ammergau 'super' is, not to get outside and have a drink, but to help forward the success of the drama.
"The groupings, both in the scenes of the play itself and in the various tableaux that precede each act, are such as I doubt if any artist could improve upon. The tableau showing the life of Adam and Eve after their expulsion from Eden makes a beautiful picture.
Father Adam, stalwart and sunbrowned, clad in sheepskins, rests for a moment from his delving, to wipe the sweat from his brow. Eve, still looking fair and happy--though I suppose she ought not to,--sits spinning and watching the children playing at 'helping father.'
The chorus from each side of the stage explained to us that this represented a scene of woe, the result of sin; but it seemed to me that the Adam family were very contented, and I found myself wondering, in my common, earthly way, whether, with a little trouble to draw them closer together, and some honest work to keep them from getting into mischief, Adam and Eve were not almost better off than they would have been mooning about Paradise with nothing to do but talk.
"In the tableau representing the return of the spies from Canaan, some four or five hundred men, women and children are most effectively massed. The feature of the foreground is the sample bunch of grapes, borne on the shoulders of two men, which the spies have brought back with them from the promised land. The sight of this bunch of grapes, we are told, astonished the children of Israel. I can quite understand its doing so. The picture of it used to astonish me, too, when I was a child.
"The scene of Christ's entry into Jerusalem surrounded by the welcoming multitude, is a wonderful reproduction of life and movement, and so also is the scene, towards the end, showing his last journey up to Calvary. All Jerusalem seems to have turned out to see him pass and to follow him, the many laughing, the few sad.
The people fill the narrow streets to overflowing, and press round the spears of the Roman Guard.
"They throng the steps and balconies of every house, they strain to catch a sight of Christ above each other's heads. They leap up on each other's backs to gain a better vantage-ground from which to hurl their jeers at him. They jostle irreverently against their priests. Each individual man, woman, and child on the stage acts, and acts in perfect harmony with all the rest.
