The Theatrical 'World' of 1893 - 97 Author:William Archer Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: did not seem to me at all at her best. In some of the crucial passages of the play I could not but think her stagey and unreal. Mr. Bourchier's part offered him ... more »small opportunities, but he handled it rather heavily; and Mr. Brandon Thomas, despite his unfailing sincerity, did not succeed in making a very credible personage of Captain Douglas. Mr. Hare was delightful as the cynical old Earl, and Miss Kate Phillips made the most of the designing widow—a part in which the date of the play was written very large. By-the-bye, the little glimpse we are given into the tragedy of Lord Ravenscroft's life struck me as the best thing in the third act; but it passed almost unnoticed. " Thyrza Fleming." f)th January. Miss Dorothy Leighton's play, Thyrza Fleming produced by the renovated Independent Theatre Society at Terry's Theatre, is marked by inexperience, but not at all by incompetence. The first act is a comedietta in itself, a spirited, natural, and entertaining duologue. As the action proceeds, Miss Leigh ton January 4—January 10. strays from the path which she seems to have proposed to herself. The play being obviously designed as a counterblast to The Heavenly Twins and other neo-puritanic denunciations of the Eternal Masculine, the romantic fable of the long-lost mother is a mere irrelevance and embarrassment. The theme is treated with such extreme delicacy that I am really quite uncertain whether Thyrza Fleming has or has not been the mistress of Colonel Rivers. If she has not, the case is flatly irrelevant, and does not touch the question of pre-nuptial morality at all. If she has—and I think we are forced to assume that she has, in spite of a half-hearted and probably hairsplitting denial on her part—then the question of pre-nuptial morality is complicated by a qu...« less