The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-02-12
PEASANTS ACT
 IN GREAT PLAY
Mime. Maeterlinch Describes St.
 Wandrille Performance
NOVEL STAGE SUTTING
How the Play Was Given Amid the Real Surroundings of an old Abbey, the Home of the
 Dramatfst

Mme. Maeterlinch in Century Magazine.
 A week has elapsed since the loves of Pelleas and Melisande dwelt at the Ab- bey of Saint-wandrille. and I awake from their dreams more stirred than when came out of Dunsinane. Qn Au- gust, 1959, Madame Leblanc Maeterlinch gave at -Wandrile performance of Macbeth" in similar circumstances to the recent production of "Pelleas ct Melsande'D
 The fact is that Shakespeare's tragedy filled with hatred and barbarc ambition, nightmare of two primitive souls is too remote from our own more civilized souls to appear probable to us. Even amid real surroundings. Macbeth" re- mains fiction, drama. The witches prophecy. Macbeth's plot against King Duncan, the apparition of the ghosts, the moving forest, are not these, despite everything fiction. impossibility7
 There was no impossibility in "Pel- leas. The misfortunes of the family of Allemonde are made out of our mis- fortunes; and these spring from our feel ings, our instincts, our errors, and our joys Nothing confiicted with the reality in which we lived, everything blended with 1t, life mingled with illusion: and, after few days rehearsal, the atmos- phere of the work prevailed so power fully that each of us felt his part In strange and sometimes comical man. ner. Pelleas has gloomy ideas Arkel philosophizes wildly with respect to ev- erythfng and nothing; Queen Genevieve airs a desperate melancholy about the park: Golaud, genial giant whose stat ure sets the whole village talking, learns his part as he hunts in the woods.
 At night we see the seven lamps of the seven maid servants roaming myste- riously far down the corridors, while the starveling group of the Three Beggars sits playing dominoes in the sacristy. As for myself, I am changed into 8 foun- tain. If an order be wrongly carried out, a parcel mislaid, a rehearsal spoiled, a dress stained, lawn too smoothly mown, or a tree too closely pruned, I weep. I weep over everything and everybody; I weep floods of tears that saturate my frock and make me look ridiculous. In few days I find that I must give up thinking of my part and devote myself to carrying my enterprise to success full issue. Despite this, I remain easily alarmed, soon troubled; and, my mind heavy with anxiety, once more I realize how deeply we feel the part which we
 
 of life. The persons embodied finger In our memory as so many tiny lives lived in a few days and cautiously com plete, for we see that they exist not only in the words learned, In the ges- lures required, In the mechanical acts accomplished No, beyond each face re- mains the. little soul that for an instant has mingled with our own; and to it. as to ourselves, the word, the gesture, the act were the consequence of more spa cious life that baptized them with con- scousness and colored them with beauty even as the daylight covers the flowers. Alone among the sad family of Ale monde, Yniold, an adorable little girl of 8, danced and gamboled, all needless of the terrible scenes being enacted around her
 I spoke just now of the servants, the beggars, the garden, the dresses, and the woods. Here all the burdensome and tedious matters of the stage be- come amusing and picturesque, I speak of the minor parts, the supernumeraries, the properties We have to find the lat ter in nature, the former among the peas ants; to discipline wild life, to force the novices' minds and awaken their in tellects It is almost touching to sec those good people familiarizing them selves with an imaginary world which remains strange to them and which they reverence the more deeply the less they understand it. Some of them-torch- bearers. serving men, or grooms-have assisted at the preparation as well as at the realization of the scenes; and their artless brains add unexpected inci- dents to the play. They tell one, for in stance how the piece begins with the arrival of Golaud, who sits down under tree and smokes pipe for quite a long time. Next, they explain that the mother of little Yniold Is not dead, but that Golaud, son of Bluebeard, has degraded her to the rank of servant in order that he may marry Melisande; this because, in reality, the actors wife Is the mother of the child and Is play ing the part of serving woman. thus accounting for scenes of intimacy which the author hardly foresaw.