Great Catherine (Whom Glory Still Adores) | Page 6

their time; but the playwrights proper,
who really kept the theatre going, and were kept going by the theatre,
did not cater for the great actors: they could not afford to compete with

a bard who was not for an age but for all time, and who had, moreover,
the overwhelming attraction for the actor-managers of not charging
author's fees. The result was that the playwrights and the great actors
ceased to think of themselves as having any concern with one another:
Tom Robertson, Ibsen, Pinero, and Barrie might as well have belonged
to a different solar system as far as Irving was concerned; and the same
was true of their respective predecessors.
Thus was established an evil tradition; but I at least can plead that it
does not always hold good. If Forbes Robertson had not been there to
play Caesar, I should not have written Caesar and Cleopatra. If Ellen
Terry had never been born, Captain Brassbound's Conversion would
never have been effected. The Devil's Disciple, with which I won my
cordon bleu in America as a potboiler, would have had a different sort
of hero if Richard Mansfield had been a different sort of actor, though
the actual commission to write it came from an English actor, William
Terriss, who was assassinated before he recovered from the dismay into
which the result of his rash proposal threw him. For it must be said that
the actor or actress who inspires or commissions a play as often as not
regards it as a Frankenstein's monster, and will have none of it. That
does not make him or her any the less parental in the fecundity of the
playwright.
To an author who has any feeling of his business there is a keen and
whimsical joy in divining and revealing a side of an actor's genius
overlooked before, and unsuspected even by the actor himself. When I
snatched Mr Louis Calvert from Shakespeare, and made him wear a
frock coat and silk hat on the stage for perhaps the first time in his life,
I do not think he expected in the least that his performance would
enable me to boast of his Tom Broadbent as a genuine stage classic.
Mrs Patrick Campbell was famous before I wrote for her, but not for
playing illiterate cockney flower-maidens. And in the case which is
provoking me to all these impertinences, I am quite sure that Miss
Gertrude Kingston, who first made her reputation as an impersonator of
the most delightfully feather-headed and inconsequent ingenues,
thought me more than usually mad when I persuaded her to play the
Helen of Euripides, and then launched her on a queenly career as
Catherine of Russia.
It is not the whole truth that if we take care of the actors the plays will

take care of themselves; nor is it any truer that if we take care of the
plays the actors will take care of themselves. There is both give and
take in the business. I have seen plays written for actors that made me
exclaim, "How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes deeds ill
done!" But Burbage may have flourished the prompt copy of Hamlet
under Shakespeare's nose at the tenth rehearsal and cried, "How oft the
sight of means to do great deeds makes playwrights great!" I say the
tenth because I am convinced that at the first he denounced his part as a
rotten one; thought the ghost's speech ridiculously long; and wanted to
play the king. Anyhow, whether he had the wit to utter it or not, the
boast would have been a valid one. The best conclusion is that every
actor should say, "If I create the hero in myself, God will send an
author to write his part." For in the long run the actors will get the
authors, and the authors the actors, they deserve.
Great Catherine was performed for the first time at the Vaudeville
Theatre in London on the 18th November 1913, with Gertrude
Kingston as Catherine, Miriam Lewes as Yarinka, Dorothy
Massingham as Claire, Norman McKinnell as Patiomkin, Edmond
Breon as Edstaston, Annie Hill as the Princess Dashkoff, and Eugene
Mayeur and F. Cooke Beresford as Naryshkin and the Sergeant.

GREAT CATHERINE
THE FIRST SCENE
1776. Patiomkin in his bureau in the Winter Palace, St. Petersburgh.
Huge palatial apartment: style, Russia in the eighteenth century
imitating the Versailles du Roi Soleil. Extravagant luxury. Also dirt and
disorder.
Patiomkin, gigantic in stature and build, his face marred by the loss of
one eye and a marked squint in the other, sits at the end of a table
littered with papers and the remains of three or four successive
breakfasts. He has supplies of coffee and brandy at hand sufficient for a