Julia Neilson (1868-1957)

"Shall We Forgive Her"
Play, by Frank Harvey
Produced at the Adelphi Theatre, Wednesday, June 20th, 1894.
(with Julia Neilson as Grace)

Mr. Frank Harvey's new play is Ibsenesque in at least one particular. It not only finishes, but begins and continues, on a note of interrogation. 'Shall we forgive her?' crops up in the first scene, and brings down the curtain in the last. We can no more away with it than Mr. Dick could with the head of "Charles the Martyr." Yet never, strange to say, was there a case admitting of less question than this of Grace West. Under promise of marriage she was decoyed to Australia, where, on finding herself alone and helpless, and her lover a scamp, she drifted into an entanglement, about which there is good reason for her to say nothing when some years later she marries Oliver West. This gentleman is an Angel Clare raised to the nth power. He belongs to the strictest sects of the Pharisees. At the corners of the streets, so to speak, he gives thanks that he is not as other men are. Chadband cradled him, and from Sir Willoughby Patterne he borrowed a few egoistic plumes. In short, so brazen a monument of smug sanctimoniousness as Mr. Oliver West it is not often given one to gaze upon.

What attitude this pious poseur will affect, when told of his wife's "past," needs no prophet to foretell. What matter that she is his loving wife, his child's devoted mother. From the sublime altitude of his colossal egotism, like Solomon Eagle from the cross of old St. Paul's, he thunders judgment upon all poor sinners alike. The Judge Jeffreys of the moral bench, he lashes himself into a fury of self-righteousness against the innocent, raves and rants and bellows at every unhappy soul arraigned before him, and in the sacred name of justice perpetrates inhumanities from which a cannibal would recoil. What can Grace expect at such hands ? Not mercy : the word finds no place in his vocabulary. Not love: his heart is flint. Nothing but insult, violence, banishment. To that sentence she submits, and her home and her child's home knows her no more. "

"Shall we forgive her?" The question is absurd. It need never have been put. Forgiveness we reserve for a Tess; perhaps for a Paula Bay. To a Dulcie Larondie had she kept her word. To a Grace West, we give pity and affection. But "forgiveness!" There is nothing to forgive. Shall we forgive him? would be more to the point. And personally I should say " No." With some appreciation of poetic justice, Mr. Harvey condemns a "hero" who walks in such spiritual darkness, to blindness utter and complete, and even as he pronounces his wife's doom West loses his sight. The punishment, however, is lifted from him, directly he sees fit to "forgive" his shamefully ill-treated wife, and the curtain falls on a somewhat unconvincing scene of reconciliation. All this is very new to the Adelphi, but it is satisfactory to record that it proves entirely to the Adelphi taste, the one thing to which the house remains unpardonably indifferent, being the exasperating priggishness of Oliver West.

That such a self-sufficient cur should pass for a hero bodes ill for the ultimate aims of modern chivalry. But in all things else the play makes for wholesomeness, for vigour, and for power, and in the opening scene in Queensland, with its lawlessness, its ruffians, and its episodes of derring-do, a high level of picturesqueness is attained. The play is long, but the acting reconciles one both to its weaknesses and its length. Miss Julia Neilson, the queenliest heroine conceivable, shows at last what force and freedom there are in her. She shakes off the fetters of "society" repose, and moves with an ampler energy, a larger grace. At the Haymarket she acted from the head. Here there is heart as well, and the actress perhaps for the first time really moves her hearers. Mr. Fred Terry's robust style is also suited to the theatre and the play. It is a contemptible character he is called upon to fill, but all that sincerity can do to dignify it is done, and his scene of the curse and the blindness is played with genuine power. Still worse off is Miss Ada Neilson as the embodiment of cast-iron respectability. Any task more thankless than to gather up virtuous skirts lest they brush the tainted heroine whom the house adores could scarcely be devised, and Miss Neilson earns the author's gratitude for her uncompromising way of doing it.

Mr. Macklin as a muscular parson of the Kingsley school cannot help but carry one's thoughts back to the Rev. Julian Gray, in Wilkie Collins' 'New Magdalen,' one of the early "problem" plays of the modern stage. Mercy Merrick's champion and Grace West's are equally fine fellows, and Mr. Macklin treads worthily in the footsteps of Mr. Frank Archer and Mr. Leonard Boyne. A blackmailer played with artistic brutality by Mr. Charles Dalton, a kindly oculist who falls to Mr. Julian Cross, one of Mrs. Henry Leigh's downright motherly "bodies," and a pair of callow lovers by pretty Miss Mabel Hardinge and Mr. Harry Eversfield, are subordinate figures in the play, which it need only be said was received with unrestrained expressions of delight.

'The Theatre', Vol XXIV, April, 1894.