Freak show

“ But, by dressing like freaks and by being able to stand anything, they have detracted considerably from their attraction for men; for freaks are well enough in freak-land but look rather silly in the world as it is—which is the world that matters, after all ”

“ It was the only tragic occurrence, he asserted, that had ever taken place in that theatre. Now, supposing this to be true—that a madman really had been conducted from the stage to room 25 and temporarily confined there—might one not reasonably believe that in this incident lay the origin of the hauntings? It was in this room, in all probability, that the outbreak of madness passed its most acute stage—that psychological stage when the rational ego makes its last desperate stand against the overwhelming assault of a new and diseased self. ”

“ In some delightful scenes the demons, with hideous masks and abundant wigs of long, red-silk hair, spread deliberate and conventional terror among the buckram grandees, and, stamping the stage wildly, leaping and whirling, relieve the long-drawn seriousness of the trilogy. It is only when the performers are without masks that the scene is recognized as intentionally a light and amusing farce, while the roars of the audience are elicited by stately, ponderous, and time-honored puns, and plays upon words that a foreigner cannot appreciate. ”

“ CHAPTER IV. SCENE OF HORROR AS VIEWED FROM THE STAGE.
All but one of the 348 members of the "Bluebeard" company escaped, although many had close calls for their lives. Some of the chorus girls displayed great coolness in the face of grave peril. Eddie Foy, who had a thrilling experience, said:
"I was up in my dressing room preparing to come on for my turn in the middle of the second act when I heard an unusual commotion on the stage that I knew could not be caused by anything that was a part of the show. ”

“ It is only the pantomime part of tragedy, the exhibition of immediate and physical distress, that which gives the greatest opportunity for ‘inexpressible dumb-show and noise,’ which is sure to tell, and tell completely on the stage. All the rest, all that appeals to our profounder feelings, to reflection and imagination, all that affects us most deeply in our closets, and in fact constitutes the glory of Shakespear, is little else than an interruption and a drag on the business of the stage. ”

“ They banged them hither and thither, shrieking with laughter when the inevitable destruction ensued, and making each miniature explosion an excuse for calling out the catchword of the evening—imported from a revue comedian whose methods, more or less successfully imitated by most of the young men on the stage, appeared to consist in the making of grotesque facial contortions:—“May—I—ask—you—politely—to—absquatulate?” ”

“ But the influence of the dumb-show upon the drama is not wholly to be measured by the extent to which it was adopted as a formal element in the structure of plays. It introduced a spectacular tendency, which continued to prevail long after the position of the dumb-show as an interact had been surrendered. Indeed, the extreme Italian development of the intermedii constituted a danger against which the lovers of a purer dramatic art were soon in protest. [605] If tragedy and comedy had not succeeded in absorbing spectacle, they would have been overwhelmed by it. ”

“ Daily we read in the newspapers with unquickened pulse of horror after horror. Merely to see a fatal runaway or automobile accident sends us home sickened or unnerved. We read to the end, though horrified, the Red Laugh of Andreiev. Reproduce accurately on the stage the terrors of the book and some persons in the audience would probably go as mad as did people in the story. This difference applies in our attitude toward moral questions as treated in books or on the stage. ”

“ They vibrate in all of these people at the slightest touch, like the strings of an old piano. Their tears, their angers, and their hatreds are all momentary, and their loves last about a week, at the longest. It is the comedy of life of nervous individuals, acted a hundredfold better than that which they present on the stage, for it is played instinctively. I might describe it thus: all women in the theater are hysterical, and the men, whether great or small, are neurasthenics. Here you will find everything but real human beings. Have you been long in the theater? ”

“ Imagine a murder, a real one, at Drury Lane, or a suicide, say, at the Gaiety! Why, the thing is monstrous, absurd! And as to a ghost—a bona fide ghost—appearing on the stage or in the auditorium, why, such an idea is without rhyme or reason; it is, in fact, inconceivable, and the public—the all-wise public—would, of course, laugh it to scorn.
But stop a moment. Does the general public know everything? Is not the theatre, to it, simply [64] the stage, and is it not profoundly ignorant of all that lies beyond the stage—away back, behind the hidden wings? ”

“ He understood; but instead of simply resuming where he had left off, from force of habit he first gave the leader's usual three sharp taps upon his music desk, and then—so queer a thing is an audience—those people, brought to their feet in an agony of terror, of fire, panic, and sudden death by a woman's cry, now at that familiar tap, tap, tap, broke here and there into laughter. By sixes and sevens, then by tens and twenties, they sheepishly seated themselves, only turning their heads with pitying looks while the ushers removed the unconscious woman. ”

“ When the premonition of the impending disaster had been given out, and after the first great thrill of horror had, for the instant, frozen the blood of every spectator and caused an involuntary check to every heart, there came quickly the manifestation of a determination to 'do or die,' to escape from the angry flames if possible. And with this determination came the positive assurance of the growing calamity, through the person of one of the actors, who but a short time previous had been playing the buffoon, setting staid people agape with amusement and turning dull care into festivity. ”

“ We see there real human beings a few feet from us; we see in the melodrama how the villain approaches his victim from behind with a dagger; we feel indignation and anger: and yet we have not the slightest desire to jump up on the stage and stay his arm. The artificial setting of the stage, the lighted proscenium before the dark house, have removed the whole action from the world which is connected with our own deeds. The consciousness of unreality, which the theater has forced on us, is the condition for our dramatic interest in the events presented. ”

“ So they look down upon human life, of which they are ignorant. They see the exits and entrances of the players, something that they suspect is meant to be kept from them (for they think they are always liable to be imposed upon) : the petty pageant of an hour ends with each scene long before the catastrophe, and the tragedy of life is turned to farce under their eyes. These people laugh loud at a pantomime, and are delighted with clowns and pantaloons. They pay no attention to anything else. The stage-boxes exist in contempt of the stage and common sense. ”

“ The theater filled with strange sounds—the wail of a banshee, the yelps of a suffering dog, a series of shrieks like the danger-blasts of a locomotive whistle. Something in me lent an ear to them and 245 wondered what they meant. Surely they could not mean that my heroine was to have an attack of hysteria at that moment in my play. That was all wrong—wholly outside of the character and the scene; enough, indeed, to kill the comedy, to turn it into farce. ”

“ This world is so mixed anyway, and audiences at any entertainment so hopelessly beyond my control. Nothing, for example, makes me feel so murderous as for an audience to go mad and stamp and kick and howl over a cornet solo with variations, no matter how ribald, and beg for more of it. And they always do!
The Passion Play, up to a comparatively few years ago, had comic characters and scenes, as for instance, there was once a scene in hell where the Devil, as chief comedian, ripped open the bowels of Judas and took therefrom a string of sausages. ”

“ The stage storm still bursts upon the drama from time to time; the theatre is still visited in due course by its rainy and tempestuous season; and thunder and lightning are, as much as in Addison's time, among the favourite devices of our playwrights, "put in practice to fill the minds of an audience with terror." The terror may not be quite of the old kind, but still it does well enough. ”

“ Now at the penny gaffs they go through a regular pantomime, consisting of from six to eight scenes, with jumps and all complete, as at a regular theatre; so that to do clown to one of them, you must be equal to those that come out at the regular theatres; and what’s more, you must strain every nerve; and what’s more still, you may often please at a regular theatre when you won’t go down at all at a penny gaff. The circus clown is as different from a penny-gaff clown as a coster is from a tradesman. ”

“ Comedy consists, though of low persons, yet of natural actions and characters; I mean such humours, adventures, and designs, as are to be found and met with in the world. Farce, on the other side, consists of forced humours, and unnatural events. Comedy presents us with the imperfections of human nature: Farce entertains us with what is monstrous and chimerical. ”

“ Instead of death-like stillness or desperate fortitude, preparing for inevitable fate, or hurrying from it with panic-fear at some uncertain opening, they have set themselves in a picturesque situation, to meet it under every disadvantage, playing off their antics like a family of tumblers at a fair, and exhibiting the horrid grimaces, the vulgar rage, cowardice, and impatience of the most wretched actors on a stage. ”

“ A corpse? Nothing of the sort—a doll! Incredulous hands are stretched out to touch, but there is no need of that. The showman begs the company to see for themselves. The head is wooden; the body (as a thin powdery stream falling to the pavement testifies) is stuffed with sawdust!
The crowd disperses. Satisfied that the tragedy was no tragedy, they yet feel a distaste for the scene of an occurrence so disturbing, and drift away to another part of the fair. The showman is left alone.
With a shrug the old magician moves towards his booth, trailing behind him the draggled figure of his puppet. ”

“ There is the same overcrowding of exciting incidents, the same mixture of comedy and tragedy, and the same desire to shock the audience with brutal murders and other enormities enacted on the stage, and to pander to their lewder tastes. ”

“ Madness became on a sudden the fashionable disease. In the salons a host of young women found occupation in playing the part of Nina, and some of them appeared to have worked themselves into a condition bordering on lunacy. The critics essayed in vain to combat this ridiculous infatuation. They pronounced the subject monstrous, the libretto insipid, the music detestable, and loudly bewailed the decay of art upon the stage. They might have saved their paper and ink. The public continued to applaud and to weep, and the receipts of the Comédie-Italienne to increase. ”

“ Now in a typical farce of the French variety (to which, in its exceedingly risky plot, its tricks and unexpected turns, this play might well belong) the spectator feels that the characters are only playing at suffering, in order to heighten for the audience the farcical effect. Here they are in desperate earnest, in anguish. Once grant the absurd situation, which, after all, is conceivably possible, and their agony is not even overdone. They are real people struggling in the midst of a farce situation. ”

“ The pert confidence of the prisoner, at the foot of the gallows, in the saving contents of a certain box, which the audience knows to be empty, is dramatic irony in its bitterest form.
Hard words have been written about the horrible scenes in the play, as though it were a huddled-up bundle of [Pg 214] bloodshed and ghosts. Such a conception is far from the truth. Horror is an element in almost all powerful tragedies; it is hardly to be separated from any unexpected or violent death. ”

“ She went through the playing with all the actors, suffered together with those paper heroes and heroines, feared with them and loved with them; she felt their nervousness before entering the stage, trembled with emotion in the pathetic moments of the play, while certain words and cries sent so strange and painful a tremor through her that they brought the tears to her eyes and a faint cry to her lips.
An increasing number of people from the audience began to come behind the scenes. Boxes of candy, bouquets, and single flowers circulated freely from hand to hand. ”

“ FARCES; FOLLIES; MORALITIES.—The comic theatre also existed. It provided farces, which were really little comedies (the most famous was the Farce of the Lawyer Patelin) ; follies, which are farcical but good-humoured caricatures of students and clerks; and moralities, which are small serious dramas, interspersed with comedy, having real personages mingled with allegorical ones. The drama of the Middle Ages was very living and highly original, coming from the soil and exactly adapted to the sentiments, passions, and ideas of the people for whom and, a little later, by whom it was written. ”