PAGE TWO Use of This Theme in Alexander . Korda’s “Men Are Not Gods” Brings - lo Mind Memorable Mishaps Behind the Footlights, When Death Seized A gun is fired on stage; an actor reels, clutches his breast, topples awk- wardly to the floor. A titter rises in the audience. Clumsy bit of acting. The curtain descends hurriedly, Behind the scenes all is confusion. 3 For the actor who took the funny fall A is not shamming—will never sham again. He is dead. Someone had sub- : stituted a real bullet for the blank. hye Real tragedy had invaded the world of 3 make-believe. Tragedy leaped across the footlights to strike down President Lincoln. For many years afterwards the spectacle t of the actor-assassin, Booth, with smoking gun in hand, was to haunt the spectators, gathered innocently te 3 view a dramatic performance, and treated to a drama they hardly cared to see. This is perhaps the outstand- ing example of tragedy stalking the players of tragedy, but there have been nunierous examples effecting the great, the near great and the lesser lights of the stage. Caruso, the great tenor, in his last performance of “Samson and Delilah,” heaved too realistically upon the pil - A I: rs of the set representing the temple at Gaza. A toppling piece of scenery fell upon him, causing severe bruises, and according to some reports_a le- ! , sion of the lung which later resulted 3 in pneumonia and death. ~ . + Garrick, playing the same “Othello” 2 is supposed to have choked more than % a dozen Desdemonas half to death—so 5 fervently did he feel his role. Mac- ready in “Macbeth” laid on so furious- : ly on one occasion that his Macduff ic: spent several months in the hospital. i That is always a fascinating theme ey —the true and the actual intruding X upon the mimicry of the stage, revers- Ri: ing the old adage—all the world’s a hs stage. Suddenly the stage becomes a } world, peopled with actual living crea- tures. Those are real tears the lead- ing lady is shedding; there is some- thing too realistic about the rage dis- played by the leading man. Something has happened uncalled for by the script. Down with the curtain! Here is drama the audience must not see! : A recent motion picture utilizes this theme for a tense sequence__for a var- : iation of the ancient theme of the play within a play. On the stage the players are enacting the familiar mur- der scene from “Othello”—but with a passion they have never displayed be- fore. An uneasiness creeps through the audience. Desdemona, pleads for 38 her life—are those the lines that : Shakespeare wrote? Yes, but they HR sound too real for blank verse, too pi real for artistic tragedy. They sound Hb almost as if— The motion picture is “Men Are Not % Gods,” an Alexander Korda film star- ring Miriam Hopkins. Sebastian Shaw plays the gloomy Moor, with Gertrude Lawrence as his Desdemona, in the play within the play. And Miss Hop- kins is the London stenographer, who, seated high in the balcony, suddenly i realizes that the couple on the stage are not play-acting, that genuine tragedy impends. Her shriek rises ‘high, and severs the ghastly union that « “had been, for one fateful moment, ef- \ “fected between the real and the make. “believe. What playgoer has not conjectured upon the possibility? Suppose the leading lady is really jealous of the leading man. “Suppose the knife she y plunges into his breast is real, and his death-gurgling not merely clever acting. It can happen. It has hap- pened. Perhaps the earliest recorded in- stance of tragedy invading the world of make-believe was in the case of the old-time Passion Play performed sev- eral hundred years ago before King John II of Sweden. The actor in the - role of Longus the Centurion perform- «ed so passionately as to cause the 3 When Tragedy Leaped Across the Footlights to Strike Lincoln— From a Contemporary Drawing was brought in upon the stage by Lear with a rope around her neck. The rope became entangled, and she was actually strangled into insensibility. Edmund Kean’s last stage appear - ance was in “Othello.” He was play- ing the title role to his son’s Iago, at the Covent Garden Theatre. Worn out by sickness, he had been warned exhausted into the arms of his son. “God,” he whispered, “I am dying. Speak to them, Charles!” pA death of two fellow actors. Enraged the King bounded to the stage, sword in hand, and with a single whistling swipe decapitated poor Longus. What Er followed, surpassed the bloodiest of ) Elizabethan dramas, for the audience arose in fury and literally tore His pi Majesty to pieces. Shakespearian drama seems to have Similarly, Sir Henry Irving made his dramatic departure from the stage in a scene in which real Death made an uncued appearance. He was play- ing Becket at Bradford, England, in been singularly unfortunate for its against appearing, but persisted in 1905. In the great last scene of the players. In 1860, in Memphis, Jenny obedience to the tradition of the stage. play, when the murderers invade the A Stanley, playing the role of Cordelia He managed to reach the great scene cathedral, Becket turns to the altar . in “Kine Lear,” narrowly escaped in the third act. Uttering the words, and with out-stretched arms cries out, death during the scene in which she “Othello’s occupation’s gone,” he fell “Into Thy hands, O Lord, into Thy The Death-Bec Miriam Hopkins, as the Stenographer in the Fateful Scene from “Men Are Not Gods” hands.” The moment these lines were spoken, Irving fell unconscious to the stage. He died as they were taking Him from the theatre to the little ho- tel where he had been stopping. One could multiply examples. A ser- ious mishap during the enacting of “The Indian Emperor” was responsible for the retirement of the famous Eng- lish actor, Farquahar, from the stage. Playing the part of Guyomar, the star dangerously wounded the player tak- ing the part of a Spanish general. The actor recovered, but Farquahar swore never to walk the boards again, and he kept his oath. Newspaper files, if carefully search- ed, will yield up scores of records of real tragedy ‘stealing the show.” As, for example, the following: “Clarence Hitchcock, 31, died in St. Vincent's Hospital of a bullet wound in the neck. He was playing the role of a lover in a drama based on the old ‘badger game.” They had reached the point where Tilker, playing the out- raged husband, discovers his wife in the arms of the other man. His cue on making the discovery was to shoot the lover. “Tilker had a blank cartridge pistol for the scene, but he also had in his pocket a loaded .38 revolver for which he had a permit. Inadvertently, he drew the wrong pistol and fired. “Tilker was held on a homicide charge but was taken ill with scarlet fever and had to be taken to the hos- THE DALLAS POST, DALLAS, PA., FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 1937 When Tragedy Stalks The S as Played by Sebastian Shaw and “Men Are Not Gods”? pital. His condition was aggravated by remorse, for the two players were friends. Tilker faces arraignment for homicide as soon as he is released from the hospital.” Even more startling was the case of Frank Allworth, who dropped dead on the stage during the first-night performance of “Portuguese Gal,” star- ring Lenore Ulric, at the Broad Street Theatre in Philadelphia, on September 2, 1935. Allworth was playing the part of a tipsy policeman. Midway in the sec- ond act he reeled and collapsed, clutch- ing Miss Ulric’'s hand as he fell. The audience tittered appreciatively at the realism of his acting. Even Miss Ulric stated later that she thought Allworth was acting, as he made a heroic effort to gasp out the unfinished line, gruesomely ap- propriate: “That's luck for me.” Allworth, however, failed to rise. The curtain was wrung down, and James Hagan, one of the authors of the play, made a short curtain speech explaining that there had been an ac- cident. Within a few minutes All- worth was dead, ‘presumably of a heart attack. He was 35 years old and mar- ried, a'memper of the Lambs Club, and regarded as an actor of high ability. 4d ’ Incidentally, the performance ras completed, Wnder the most trying con. ditions any cast has ever experienced. E. Hartiofdy stage manager, stepped Gerirude Lawrence in into Allwortn’s role, reading the script for the completion of the third act The audience was not informed of Allworth’s death until the final cur- tain. mm ere have heen numerous minor shaps, bordering just short of trag- edy. A French actress, Mme. Benoin, in Pra gue, during a suicide scene, seriously stabbed herself with a stage dagger whose spring got out of order. Incidentally, accidents of this nature have been common enough to bar the use of such daggers. In all of these cases, it is = worth noting, the audience was unaware of the shift from the sham Aragedy to the genuine. Resourceful actors cov- ered up the true significance of what the audience was witnessing, so that to the irony of the situation was add- ed the applause of the innocent wit- nesses who saw death before them, and accepted him as part of the en- tertainment. There have been similar tragedies and near tragedies intruding upon the set in motion picture production as well as on the stage. Dick Rosson, location director for Samuel Goldwyn, tells the story of not one but a ser- ies of deaths during the location shooting of “Viva Villa.” None of them, incidentally, was accidental. The first to go was an extra, stab- bed by a Bowie knife flourished too enthusiastically. It developed that the assailant meant what he was doing— there had been a feud over the af- fections of some local belle. The next one went in somewhat similar fashion when a Mexican slip- ped a real bullet into the chamber of his gun during a mock execution scene. Here was the perfect crime. The victim was hit between the eyes, and no one ever discovered who was the murderer among the group of ex- MacReady in the role of Macheth tras simulating the execution squad. Small wonder, therefore, that this theme has in itself been adopted by the stage, and in turn by the motion pictures. In mystery play and melo- drama the theme has been repeated, with players enacting roles they might some day be called upon to play In good earnest. “Men Are Not Gods,” which utilizes the theme for its basic scene, was written by Walter Reisch, who also directed the screen play. The cast, in addition to Miriam Hopkins, Gertrude Lawrence and Sebastian Shaw, in- cludes A. E. Matthews, Rex Harrison, Laura Smithson, Winifred Willard, James Harcourt, Noel Howlett, Sybil Grove, Lawrence Grossmith and others. It will be released through United ‘Artists. wr A
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers