Quotes on acting 9: George Bernard Shaw on Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree

I love this because it shows Beerbohm’s inability to be in anything BUT the moment. Rather amusing. I love descriptions of performances that we, in the modern age, actually cannot see. They only existed on the stage, in the performance at that moment. I have tons of these anecdotes, and I adore them.

Now if I were to say that [Sir Herbert Beerbohm] Tree foresaw nothing and considered nobody, I should suggest that he was a much less amiable man than he was…

Of the foresight which foresees and faces entirely uninteresting facts, and the consideration which considers entirely uninteresting persons, he had as little as a man can have without being run over in the street. When his feelings were engaged, he was human and even shrewd and tenacious. But you really could not lodge an indifferent fact in his mind. This disability of his was carried to such a degree that he could not remember the passages in a play which did not belong or bear directly upon his own conception of his own part: even the longest run did not mitigate his surprise when they recurred. Thus he never fell into the commonest fault of the actor: the betrayal to the audience that he knows what his interlocutor is going to say, and is waiting for his cue instead of conversing with him. Tree always seemed to have heard the lines of the other performers for the first time, and even to be a little taken aback by them.

Let me give an extreme instance of this.

In Pygmalion the heroine, in a rage, throws the hero’s slippers in his face. When we rehearsed this for the first time, I had taken care to have a very soft pair of velvet slippers provided; for I knew that Mrs. Patrick Campbell was very dexterous, very strong, and a dead shot. And sure enough, when we reached this passage, Tree got the slippers well and truly delivered with unerring aim bang in his face. The effect was appalling. He had totally forgotten that there was any such incident in the play, and it seemed to him that Mrs. Campbell, suddenly giving way to an impulse of diabolical wrath and hatred, had committed and unprovoked and brutal assault on him. The physical impact was nothing; but the wound to his feelings was terrible. He collapsed on the nearest chair, and left me staring in amazement, whilst the entire personnel of the theatre crowded solicitously round him, explaining that the incident was part of the play, and even exhibiting the prompt-book to prove their words. But his morale was so shattered that it took quite a long time, and a good deal of skillful rallying and coaxing from Mrs. Campbell, before he was in a condition to resume the rehearsal.

The worst of it was that as it was quite evident that he would be just as surprised and wounded next time, Mrs. Campbell took care that the slippers should never hit him again, and the incident was consequently one of the least convincing in the performance.

George Bernard Shaw
Herbert Beerbohm Tree: Some Memories Of Him And Of His Art (1920)

Hahahaha