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