A
Glimpse of Theater History
DION BOUCICAULT, Sr. (c.
1820-90) Playwright, Actor, Producer
Dion
Boucicault's remarkable career began in 1841 with the successful production
of his own (with Charles Mathews) London Assurance and continued
virtually unabated until his death in 1890. As a playwright, he had an
uncanny knack for anticipating the fickle tastes of his audiences on both
sides of the Atlantic and providing them with just the novelty they wanted.
When they wanted historical romance, he gave them Louis XI; when
domestic plays were to be in vogue, he provided Dot (an adaptation
of Dicken's The Cricket in the Hearth);
when Irish plays were to take the field, came Arrah na Pogue, The Shaughraun
and Robert Emmet; when Americans wanted to see themselves portrayed,
he gave them The Octoroon; when the
sensationalism of horse-racing (and those astonishing Victorian dioramas)
caught the public's eye, he gave them The Flying Scud; when the
taste for detective stories took hold, he gave them Mercy Dodd or Presumptive
Evidence; and when the three-act farce was to take center stage in
the 1880's, he gave us Forbidden Fruit. He wrote the acting version
of Rip Van Winkle that was the most successful starring vehicle
for Joseph
Jefferson III.
The Octoroon was also noteworthy as the first truly serious treatment of the still devisive topic of racial discrimination in the USA. Based loosely on two novels, The Quadroon by Mayne Reid and The Filibuster by Albany Fonblanque, Boucicault added the part of Wahnotee, a crafty and noble Native American and utilized the latest in technology, an automatic camera, and concocted a theatrically potent melodrama. Even though it opened just three days after the execution of John Brown, Boucicault did not seem to have a political axe to grind. Joseph Jefferson pointed out that the play's thesis was "non-committal. The dialogue and characters of the play made one feel for the South, but the action proclaimed against slavery and called loudly for its abolition."
Most
literary critics point out that there was nothing extraordinary about
Boucicault's use of language and many bemoan the lack of depth in his
characters. This (and the fairly large cast sizes) may account for the
fact that few of his plays are produced today. (Still, Donald Sinden's
star tour of London Assurance through the States in the 1970's
was a smashing success, so perhaps a second look at the canon is in order.)What
is generally overlooked by these finders of fault, however, is the stageworthiness
and command of the theatrical form and of the rhetoric of the theatre
which Boucicault possessed. And through his remarkable career, he was
an innovator. For example, in Forbidden Fruit, he divided the
stage into two compartments in Act I, and into two rooms and a corridor
in Act III, to keep the action moving. In Flying Scud, which ran
for two hundred nights in London and 41 in New York, the horse race central
to the plot was accomplished by means of what The Times described
as "small profile horses in the background and at the end Nat appears
in front, seated on a real, live Flying Scud." Despite its extraordinary
success with audiences, Boucicault reworked the play so that the version
that is available today through Samuel French, Ltd., London is more suspenseful
and exciting than the original. He was always more than willing to please
his audience. He rewrote the ending to The Octoroon because London
audiences which wanted a happy ending for his heroine Zoe.
A fascinating glimpse into Boucicault's working
methods is provided by actress Rose Eytinge:
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The play [Led Astray] was like a child whose growth one can mark from day to day. Boucicault did edit it with a pair of scissors anda paste-pot, but he corrected it with a note-book and a pencil. There were in the company one or two persons who could, on occasionsay some rather bright things. "These things to hear" would Dion Boucicault "seriously incline"; but while the company laughed at them at the moment and forgot them the next, not so the astute Dion; he would either pass them by apparentlywithout notice, or with a grave expression of disapproval at our levity in such a serious moment. But the next morning, at a place in the dialogue where one of these quips could be used with profit, our mento would pause, as if a thought had just struck him, and say, "Sop a bit," and out would come that little note-book, "JUst say, instead of so-and-so,"-- and then he would read, asa quite fresh thought, some child of wit that had been born at the previous day's rehearsal. When this first occured, the quiet coolness of the transaction somewhat took away our breath; but afterward we used rahter to await with interest the advent of these little waifs. But never did any one venture to intimate ot the great dramatist that this little trick of annexation had been observed. |
But she goes on to observe:
| ...Dion Boucicault was a great man,--great if only in his power to assimilate the work of others, and, clothing it in the graceful garb of his own charming words, make the world forget that it had ever had a previous existence. |
Some scholars claim that Boucicault was the first English playwright to collect royalties for his work. Shortly after his arrival in America, he joined with Robert Montgomery Bird and George Henry Boker to push for dramatic copywright laws in America, which efforts were successful in 1856, though it would be many more years before the laws were clear and enforceable.
As an actor, Dion Boucicault was lionized in many of the roles he created for himself. He was at his best in Irish roles: Miles na Coppaleen in The Colleen Bawn, Shaun the Post in Arrah Na Pogue, Conn, the Shaughraun in The Shaughraun. Joseph Knight said of him:
| Mr. Boucicault is probably the best stage Irishman that has been seen. It is impossible to make drollery more unctuous, and blarney more attractive, than they appear in his rendering. To the vitality he imparts to the character of Conn the success of the piece is largely attributable. |
He played the ultimate stage Yankee, Salem Scudder in The
Octoroon as well.
Henry
James, writing in the Nation about his impression of The Shaughraun,
gives us a glimpse into Boucicault's ability to capture an audience:
| For Mr. Boucicault, both as author and actor, it is a great triumph-especailly as actor. His skill and shrewdness in knocking together effective situations and spinning lively dialogue are certainly commendable; but his acting is simply exquisite. One is hard cleverness, polished and flexible with use; the other is very like genius. The character of the Shaughraun is very happily fancied, but the best of the entertainment is to see the fancy that produced it still nightly playing with it. One hears it said sometimes that an actor acts with "authority;" certainly there is rarely a higher degree of authority than this. Mr. Boucicault smiles too much, we think; he rather overdoes the softness, the amiability, the innocence of his hero; but these exaggerations perhaps only depen the charm of his rendering; for it was his happy thought to devise a figure which should absolutely please. It has pleased mightily. |
As a theorist, Boucicault was ever the pragmatist. He had little to say in print on the subject of dramaturgy. It seemed to him a matter of instinct, but he had words of advice to his fellow actors. They should choose their line of business according to the gifts that nature had given them and stick to it. He didn't always follow his own advice. The venerable Times said of his Salem Scudder that Boucicault "...appears in a line, to him, entirely new, and succeeds to perfection." Circumstances alter cases. On the occasion of his address to actors and actresses at Henry Irving's Lyceum, he delivered a rambling exposition of his own thoughts on the acting profession. He decried the French method of teaching acting as merely teaching novices how to walk and talk.
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...Great painters, I am told, used to draw a human figure in the nude form, and when they were proposing to finish their pictures, to paint the costumes; then the costumes came right. That is exactly how an actor ought to study his art. He ought to paint his character in the nude form and put the costume on the last thing. Acting is not mere speech! It is not taking the dialogue of the author and giving it artistically, but sometimes not articulately. Acting is to perform, to be the part; to be it inyour arms, your legs; to be what you are acting, to be it all over, that is acting. The subject of acting may be divided into the voice for the treatment of the production; the expression of feature or gesture. I call gesture that action of the body above the waist--the arms, the neck, the head, and the bust. The carriage is that action of the body which is below the waist. ...Nature knows best. If you happen to have a short sharp face, a hard voice, an angular figure, you are suited for the intellectual characters of the drama, such as Hamlet and so forth. If you are of a soft, passionate nature--if you have a soft voice and that sort of sensuous disposition which seems to lubricate your entire form, your limbs, so that your movements are gentle and softer than others, then this character is fitted for a Romeo or an Othello. You will find, if you look back at the records of actors, there are few great actors that have shone in the two different lines, the intellectual and the sensual drama. Kemble could do Hamlet, but he could not do Othello. Kean could do Othello, but he could not do Hamlet. The one was passionate and sensual, the other was an intellectual, a noble, a grand actor. Now, after you have made this preliminary study you will recollect that in every great character, there are three characters really. We are all free men, in one sense, speaking, of course of our inner life; but we have three characters. First there is the man by himself--as he is to himself--as he is to God. That is one man, the inner man, as he is when alone, the unclothed man. Then there is the native man, the domestic; man, as he is to his family. Still there is a certain amount of disguise. He is not as he is to other men. Then there is the man as he stands before the world at large; as he is outside in society. Those are the three characters. They are all in the one man, and the dramatist does not know his business unless he puts them into one character. |