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.
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