Sex in Play-acting

The Player Woman.—Miss Clo Graves predicts that

The player woman, once despised, shall stand
A power for good, a glory to the land.

This is pitching it a little strong, perhaps, but the thing may happen; you cannot refute a prophecy, anyhow. Meanwhile, the question is how the player woman stands to-day. I should be inclined to answer: In a much more comfortable position than the player man. Indeed, she has a far better case, I think, than is generally made out for her. Is the stage a career for women? is the modest question one frequently hears. As if there could be any doubt about it! A much more ticklish question to answer would be: Is the stage a career for men? The Shade of Plato, and Mr. Augustine Birrell, and Professor Raleigh, to name no other malcontents, would join in an emphatic No. The truth is, on the stage all the advantages fall to what our forefathers called the spindle side. A moralist of the last century

struck the balance between the sexes in this matter when he said that an actor was less than a man, an actress more than a woman.

It is the fashion, I am aware, nowadays to ignore the distinction between the sexes. There is Mr. Bernard Shaw's famous dictum, that "we shall never do any good until we recognise that women are just like ourselves, only a little worse educated." This may be true of actual life, though one has one's doubts; it is certainly untrue of stageland. There the distinction between the sexes is sharp. With absolute equality of talent the difference of sex gives the advantage to the woman. In going on the stage the woman always has something to gain, the man always something to lose. In the first place, the very limitations of the stage make for her, and against him. The fields of man's special activity, the fields into which woman enters rarely if ever, are precisely the fields which it does not suit the purposes of the drama to explore. Public life, for example, the business of government, the ministrations of the church, the labour of money-getting, the practice of the learned professions, the world of scientific discovery, of abstract thought—these are not easily reducible to terms of drama. Drama deals by preference with the domestic affections, marriage, love, jealousy, parental relationship—all matters in which woman cuts at least as important a figure as man. Man the philosopher, man the strugforlifeur, man the steady, plodding drudge, "gets no show." The instincts and the emotions are

the stuff of drama, and women are the instinctive and emotional sex. This is the weak side of man, and yet the only side that he is allowed to turn to the footlights. Antony was a statesman, a general, a strategist, but we only see him as the lover of Cleopatra. Faust was a philosopher; in the theatre he becomes a poor moonlight warbler in the company of Marguerite. The deeds that made Othello great we have on mere hearsay evidence; they are "what the soldier said”; we only see-what a "worriting" husband he makes. Torvald Helmer was a first-rate bank manager; but the one thing he could do well he is debarred from doing on the stage. In "The Professor's Love Story" what do we see of the professor as professor ? Nothing; we only see an absent-minded elderly gentleman making a fool of himself with a chit of a girl. In this sense, then, the stage is under petticoat government. And man may say to woman, "The theatre doesn't deal fairly between us; I can do all sorts of things that you can't, and these are the very things that are ruled out of the game."

Another consideration. As you saunter down Regent Street of a fine afternoon, with your eyes open, you may observe the faces of all the men you meet turned successively and automatically and at the same angle towards the same object. That object is a pretty woman, and her passage down the street thus causes a sort of But you will never observe

ripple in the crowd of men.

the passage of a man causing the same ripple in the The meaning of which is that it is

crowd of women.

woman's part in life to be looked at, but that it is not man's. Now players are people who of necessity make a show of themselves. A woman, doing this in life, can do it on the stage without derogating from the dignity of her sex. She is merely pursuing her métier de femme in making herself beautiful on the stage, as every woman who can makes herself off it. But a man who occupies himself professionally with the business of being a "pretty fellow" is doing something a little unmanly. Nothing is so odious as the vanity of an actor on the score of his personal attractions. The simpering, posturing heroes of our West-end photograph shops make one's gorge rise. But the pride of a woman in her beauty seems a natural and proper thing, and the stage a legitimate place for giving that pride full sway. Indeed, feminine vanity there becomes rangée, as it were, and a valuable asset. It is as though you took a wild scape-grace and "made a man of him" with the Queen's shilling and the goose-step.

Note further that those special qualities of simulation, dissimulation, and ruse which, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer and other learned authorities, have been bred in woman during the centuries of her subjection to the will of man, are the very qualities which enable her to romp in an easy winner on the stage; for they are the basis of histrionic art. Is it not a commonplace to say that "every woman is a born actress "? In the little comedies of make-believe which all children play among themselves, you shall invariably find the girls taking the

leading part; it is the boys who are clumsy and ashamed, exclaiming, "Oh, this is all rot, you know."

Now an

For one

The catalogue of the player woman's advantages is not yet exhausted. You may observe that between the actor and his part there is very often a disproportion which does not exist in the case of the actress. When you see an actor figuring as a Mark Antony, a Richelieu, a Napoleon, it is apt to occur to you that if Fate were suddenly to call upon him to play his personage in real earnest he would be somewhat embarrassed. actress is generally on the level of her part. reason, because there is in life—at any rate, if we are to believe the physiologists-comparatively little difference between woman and woman; for another, because, notoriously, a woman can adapt herself to a new milieu, the dairymaid turn duchess, with marvellous suppleness; for yet another reason, because the emotions women are for the most part called upon to express on the stage— love, jealousy, self-sacrificing devotion, tender submissiveness or the fury of revolt-are emotions of which in real life they are perfectly capable. And even when the real woman is not on the level of her assumed character she can generally contrive to appear so by the exercise of a faculty in which once more she excels man -the faculty of what one of Dickens's people called "poll-parroting." "Pritchard," said Johnson of a famous Lady Macbeth, "in common life was a vulgar idiot; she would talk of her gownd; but when she appeared upon the stage seemed to be inspired by