It was now, when I had begun to feel a bit at ease in my queer foreign
environment, that Mr. Belknap-Jackson broached his ill-starred plan
for amateur theatricals. At the first suggestion of this I was
immensely taken with the idea, suspecting that he would perhaps
present "Hamlet," a part to which I have devoted long and intelligent
study and to which I feel that I could bring something which has not
yet been imparted to it by even the most skilled of our professional
actors. But at my suggestion of this Mr. Belknap-Jackson informed me
that he had already played Hamlet himself the year before, leaving
nothing further to be done in that direction, and he wished now to
attempt something more difficult; something, moreover, that would
appeal to the little group of thinking people about us--he would have
"a little theatre of ideas," as he phrased it--and he had chosen for
his first offering a play entitled "Ghosts" by the foreign dramatist
Ibsen.
I suspected at first that this might be a farce where a supposititious
ghost brings about absurd predicaments in a country house, having seen
something along these lines, but a reading of the thing enlightened me
as to its character, which, to put it bluntly, is rather thick. There
is a strain of immorality running through it which I believe cannot be
too strongly condemned if the world is to be made better, and this is
rendered the more repugnant to right-thinking people by the fact that
the participants are middle-class persons who converse in quite
commonplace language such as one may hear any day in the home.
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