“I suppose you have improved in many ways on the old-fashioned style of acting?”
This widely cast question invited such a shoal of answers that the conscientious examinee paused to consider.
“I will try to mention a few of the changes which I have done my best to bring about. The first thing I aimed at was greater freedom of interpretation. Tradition weighed like a millstone on the actor’s neck. Instead of painfully and slavishly copying a predecessor, I set the example, as soon as I felt influential enough, of forming and putting into action my own conception of a character. But it was a hard task. Then I tried to introduce more natural diction. Ranting and hollow declamation were the rule. Even now one is compelled to pitch the voice very high on account of the music, which some actors find an aid to delivery.”
“But isn’t that most fatiguing for the voice?”
“Not in well-built theatres, like the Kabuki-za, where the vaulted roof leaves nothing acoustically to be desired.”
“Ah! that, I think, was a real reform. The old actors’ faces were barred with red and blue stripes to make them look ferocious, and, though they may have terrified the audience, they could not impress it in any other way, for variety of expression was impossible. Now, without discarding paint altogether, we aim at conveying all the emotions by play of feature, leaving sometimes to the musicians the task of rendering them into words.”
In this respect I was able to confirm the actor’s words by personal observation. Nothing had struck me as more peculiarly characteristic of a Japanese audience than its delight in histrionic grimace. The loudest applause, the frenetic shouts of “Hi-ya! Hi-ya!” had been evoked in my hearing, not by repartee or tirade, but always by convulsive contortions of visage in moments of supreme misery or rage. The word _grimace_ connotes, I am afraid, that contempt, allied with coarseness of sensibility, which the stoical Anglo-Saxon is apt to entertain towards more gesticular and sensitive races. But some of Sara Bernhardt’s death-scenes would be appreciated at their full value by the acute, minute observers of Tōkyō, just as all Paris was thrilled and captivated by Sada Yacco’s realistic dying.