People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 December 1896 — NUPKINS AWAKENED. [ARTICLE]

NUPKINS AWAKENED.

THE ONLY PLAY EVER WRITTEN BY WILLIAM MORRIS. .• —: —, : ’ t}}'/ Zt WjM a Satire on the Justice Dispensed by Sir Peter Edlln—The Poet Artist Took a Part Himself—A Socialist Benefit Performance. On the subject of the theater, an enthusiastic young first nighter would probably have given Morris up after the first attempt to gather his opinion of “The Second Mra as an ordinary citizen who had never formed the habit of playgoing, and neither knew nor oared anything about the theater except as a treat for children once a year during the pantomine season. But Morris would have written for the stage if there had been any stage that a poet and artist could write for. When the Socialist league once proposed to raise the wind by a dramatic entertainment and suggested that he should provide the play, he set to at once and provided it. And what kind of play was it? Was it a miraole play on the lines of those scenes in the Towneley mysteries between the “shepherds abiding in the field,” which he used to quote with great relish as his idea of a good bit of comedy? Not at aIL It was a topical extravaganza, entitled “Nupklns Awakened,” the ohief “character parts” being Sir Peter Edlln, Tennyson and an imaginary archbishop of Canterbury. Sir Peter owed the oompliment to his activity at that time in sending socialists to prison on charges of “obstruction,” which was always proved by getting a policeman to swear that if any passerby or vehicle had wished to pass over the particular spot in a thoroughfare on which the speaker or his audience happened to be standing their presence would have obstructed him.

This contention, which was regarded as quite sensible and unanswerable by the newspapers of the day, was put into a nutshell in the oourse of Sir Peter’s summing up in the play. “In fact, gentlemen, it is a matter of grave doubt we afe not all of us continually committing this offense from our cradles to our graves. ” This speech, which the real Sir Peter of course never made, though he certainly would have done so had he had wit enough to see the absurdity of solemnly sending a man to prison for two months beoause another man could not walk through him, especially wheD it would have been so easy to look him up for three months on some respectable pretext, will probably keep Sir Peter’s memory green when all his actual judicial utterances are forgotten. As to Tennyson, Morris took a socialist who happened to combine the right sort of beard with a melancholy temperament and drilled him in a oertain portentous incivility of speech which, taken from the quality of his remarks, threw a light on Morris’ opinion of Tennyson which was all the more instructive because he delighted in Tennyson’s verse as keenly as Wagner delighted in the musio of Mendelssohn, whose credit for qualities of larger scope he nevertheless wrote down and destroyed.

Morris played the ideal Archbishop himself. He made no attempt to make up the part in the ordinary stage fashion. He always contended that no more was necessary for stage illusion than some indistinot conventional symbol, such as a halo for a saint, a crbok for a bishop, or, if you liked, a cloak and dagger for the villain and a red wig for the comedian. A pair of clerical bands and black stockings proclaimed theArohbishop. The rest he did by obliterating his humor and intelligence and presenting his own person to the audienoe like a lantern with the light blown out, with a dull absorption in his own dignity which several minutes of the wildest screaming laughter at him when he entered could not disturh. I laughed immoderately myself, and I can still see quite clearly the long top floor of that warehouse in the Farringdon road as I saw it in glimpses between my paroxysms, with Morris gravely on the stage in his bands at one end; Mrs. Stillman, a tall and beautiful figure, rising like a delioate spire above a sky line of city chimney pots, at the other, and a motley sea of rolling, wallowing, guffawing socialists between. There has been no other such successful first night within living memory, I believe, but I remember only *one dramatic critic who took care to bo present —William Archer. Morris was so. interested by his experiment in this sort of composition that he for some time talked of trying his hand at a serious drama and would no doubt have done it had there been any practical occasion for it or any means of consummating it by stage representation under proper conditions without spending more time on the job than it was worth. Later, at one of the annual festivities of the Hammersmith Socialist society, he played the old gentleman in the bath chair in a short piece called "The Duohess of Bayswater” (not by himself), which once served its turn at the Haymarket as a curtain raiser. It was impossible for such a born teller and devourer of stories as he was to be indifferent to an art which is nothing more than the most vivid and real of all ways of story telling. No man would more willingly have seen his figures move and heard their voices than he.—Saturday Review.