The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1908-03-15

while The undesirable citizens use
] her. during that time, i'm a political
campaign TO defeat the manufacturer
canvass for congress. The particulars
don't make an engrossing play; jour-
nalism. politics and finance are reck-
lessly maligned, too many men of those
callings are represented as .undesira-
/ bic citizens" yet it doesn't miss fire
as a popular show How can it, when
tit contains blithesome things such as
! the stock bettors in a brokers office
! stopping the stress of business to sing
and dance with the pretty typewriters2
/ In Brooklyn borough. three months
ago, | saw Edward H. Sothern offer
THE Fool Hath Said There Is no
/ God, !" TO an audience which discerned
naught in it, as / told you at the time.
beyond a tediously dun meIodrama !;
and not so much as a brief paragraph
in Manhattan borough journal was
given to it. This week, Manhattan s
reviewers are filling columns with dis
cuSsion of its introduction into Broad
way. The point impressed on me in
this second view is that the effectual-
| ity of play depends on the audience
quite as much as on the matter itself,
or the manner of its delivery. This
melodrama, you will remember, was
made by Henry Irving's son, Laurence,
| from Dostoieffski's famous novel.
Crime and Punishment" in which an
agnostic, anarchistic and neurasthenic
student murders and robs misery
oppressor of some orphaned children
so as to get the cruel ones money for
the starving victims. The murderer
believes his deed is just. and is proud
! of it; yet so weak-nerved is he. so i'm
aginative and apprehensive, that he
fancies the police detectives suspect
him, and through his own fright pro-
vides the clues for them to convict him.
A dull audience in Brooklyn took no
account of the ethical study, and was
bored by the discussions of the moral,
political and religious aspects of the
students crime. But an audience in
Broadway sat alert and thoughtful
during the three hours and a quarter
that Sothern INDUCED his habit of pro-
longing his performances.
X x \
1t was observable, however. that the
somewhat drowsily appreciative audi
ence was reused perceptibly by that
one of the six acts in which what our
| police call the third degree" was
worked on the student For a third of
an hour, the question of the murders
| right or wrong was set aside and
merely melodramatic interest was sus-
| tanned by the law officers tricks to
extract confession, This portion of
| the drama would go as we'll in the
Bowery as in Broadway. 1t created the
same interest in people of extra Gull
ture that all grades of detective fic-
| ton, from the stories of Sherlock
Holmes to those of Old Sleuth. do in
! the multitude. The culprit's resolute
courage and scowardly terror are ex-
pressed acutely by Sothern; and the
sympathy is with him so positively
that, when the CORY corpse of his vic
tim is exposed to him suddenly, his
agonized cry of confession is followed
by the audiences sigh of pity and re-
greet. l fear that, although at the end
The Fool Hath Said There Is No
God converts the student to Chris
tianity Gin the play, not in the book
| is is also an excuse for black hand
murders and an Indictment to the as
sassination of rulers.
So far as l could judge, Irvings re-
| ligious twist of Dostoieffski's utterly
unreligious story did not appeal po-
tently to Broadway people. They gave
the gravest attention, from o'clock to
past II, to the students anarchistic
and nihilistic justification of his crime:
and l think most of them expected, if