Basil Rathbone: Fedora

A play in four acts by Victorien Sardou. Opened at the Globe Theatre, London, October 30, 1920. Closed on February 5, 1921, after 111 performances. General Manager, Henry Dana; Stage Manager, E. Vivian Reynolds; Assistant Stage Manager, E. A. Walker; Producer, Louis N. Parker; Scenery, Joseph and Phil Harker; Musical Director, Carlton Mason; Costumes, Worth, Handley Seymour, B.J. Simmons and Co., Rose Leverick.

Written in 1881, Fedora is a tragedy about a woman avenging her lover’s death.

Fedora Romanova, a widowed princess in St. Petersburg, is on the point of contracting a new marriage; she has been secretly engaged to Count Vladimir Yariskin, the son of the police chief.

On the evening with which the play opens, the princess has been waiting for her fiancé, Vladimir. He has failed to keep an appointment to take her to the opera, and she is filled with a dread that something terrible has happened to him. She has hastened to his quarters, but his servants can give her no information. At last he is found mortally wounded.

He has been shot by an unknown assassin. When Vladimir dies, Fedora's grief reaches a climax and turns to a thirst for revenge. At length she arrives at the conclusion that the murder was committed by Count Loris Ipanoff, a young nobleman who lives in the house opposite Count Vladimir. She believes that the murder was politically motivated. Count Loris has fled to Paris and, as the French government does not permit the extradition of political criminals, Fedora must take revenge into her own hands.

Act II takes place in Paris. Fedora gains admission to the salons of Countess Olga Soukareva, whose house is a resort for political refugees. In this circle Fedora becomes acquainted with Loris Ipanoff with the purpose of discovering and betraying the exact details of his crime. But soon a new passion begins to mingle with the desire for revenge. Loris falls in love with Fedora, and she is not indifferent. She begins to doubt his guilt.

Fedora hopes against hope that Loris is innocent, but in the throes of his love-making she wrings from him the fact that he is not. He admits killing Vladimir, but calls it "the execution of a sentence." He declines to explain further, having no knowledge that Fedora is the murdered man's fiancé. Ipanoff has in fact made to her an avowal of his love. In her inmost heart Fedora reciprocates his feeling, but the passion of revenge being uppermost, she stifles her love. She believes that his statement about the murder being "the execution of a sentence" means that it was committed by order of the political faction known as the nihilists. Loris is to come to her villa on the Seine river at midnight and tell her the whole story. Fedora places spies and the police at the end of the garden to catch him on his way home. Fedora intends to have him secured and taken in her yacht to Havre and thence to St. Petersburg to be given up to the father of the murdered man.

While waiting for Count Loris, Fedora writes a letter to the St. Petersburg police that names two persons who are supposed to have been accessories to the count's crime. One of them is Loris' brother Valerien. Hardly has she dispatched this fateful letter when Count Loris arrives at Fedora's villa. He explains to her that his deed was not politically motivated. Ipanoff was married and discovered that Vladimir was having an affair with his wife. He caught them together and shot Vladimir. The guilty wife escaped, without taking her heavy fur cloak. She was taken ill with pneumonia caused by exposure and died within a week.

Fedora now realizes that Ipanoff saved her from marrying a worthless, dishonorable man. She also realizes that she loves him as passionately as he does her. To prevent him being captured and taken to Russia, she implores him to stay with her. Worried about ruining Fedora's good name, Loris refuses. It is only when Fedora flings herself into his arms that he consents to remain, and the curtain falls on their embrace.

A few days pass in the delirium of love. Fedora and Loris have just had a charming holiday together. Loris has been pardoned by the Russian Government and the pair are just about to return to Russia to settle down in peace. Then fate overtakes them.

As a result of Fedora's denunciatory letter to St. Petersburg, Loris' only brother has been thrown into prison as his accomplice and accidentally been drowned in his cell. The shock of the news has killed their adored mother. Moreover, a friend of Loris is coming to Paris bringing the letter which has betrayed him. So Fedora's guilt will be found out. Fedora is beside herself with fear and remorse when Loris enters. When he asks about her agitation, Fedora confesses to him her part in the deaths of his mother and brother. There is no pardon for her deed; Ipanoff disavows her. He seizes her by the throat and would have strangled her. But Fedora wrenches herself free and swallows poison out of a little phial she wears round her neck. After a few moments agony she falls dead at his feet.

The Passing Shows

I always think that Sardou must have been the grandfather of "the pictures." I feel when watching one of his plays that here indeed is, as it were, a super-film come to life. He has no use for subtlety. And the actor who employs it in his playing takes away the flesh which still hangs on to these dramatic "old bones." Sardou, the dramatist, was out for action, action, as much of it as he could cram into four long acts, and for all that action on the stage is worth. I must confess that as a theatrical entertainment his methods are worth all the milk-and-water drawing-room comedies of today put together. They are just as far removed from real life, and not nearly so thrilling. And so I welcomed Miss Marie Löhr's magnificent revival of Fedora the other evening. It may not be a dramatic classic, but it leaves you with the comfortable sensation that if murder, and treachery, and villainy, and beautiful heroism, and Russian Nihilists, and wonderful clothes, count for anything, you get more than your money's worth. Also, it seems to me that Fedora, in spite of its artificiality, its dexterous but quite apparent mechanism, its somewhat absurd story and its very obvious cheap melodrama, has worn better than its "sister" thrill, La Tosca. It is no use denying that, once having seen Bernhardt as Fedora, no other actress can surround the part with quite the same glamour and magnificence; but even then Miss Marie Löhr comes through the ordeal quite wonderfully. She played the part for all it was worth. Nothing was suppressed. If she wept, she wept for all to see; if she had hysterics, well, no one could mistake it for anything else; when she died, she died properly, leaving no suspicion that she had merely gone to sleep. And withal she looked admirably pretty in clothes which alone ought to fill the Globe Theatre with women for weeks to come. And Mr. Basil Rathbone, after he had fully realised that one must play Sardou as Sardou intended—that is, vividly, not to say violently—was wholly admirable as Louis [sic]. A little cold at first, he threw himself into the situations as fervidly as anyone towards the end. As for Miss Ellis Jeffreys as Countess Olga, she could not possibly go wrong with such a part. Her acting was as fascinating as anything in the whole play. Moreover, she was most agreeably accompanied throughout her scenes by Mr. Allan Aynesworth, as her and Fedora's friend. "ARKAY."

—The Tatler, November 10, 1920

Several film versions of the play were made in the 1910s and 1920s, including Paramount's version made in 1918. The final scene in which the Princess Fedora commits suicide by taking poison was altered to the conventional "clinch"—Count Ipanoff returning in time to prevent Fedora from swallowing the poison and taking her in his arms in full forgiveness.

The hat known as a fedora got its name from this play. At the premiere of Sardou's Fedora in 1881, Sarah Bernhardt made her entrance wearing a new style of soft felt hat with the crown creased lengthwise. It became fashionable and was known forever after as a fedora.

"Fedora, a characteristically French play, permits a wonderful display of characteristically English acting. Of the half dozen important performances you might take each one for an exhibit in a dissertation on the histrionic art—such perfection of technical skill, such certainty of effect. ... Mr. Basil Rathbone, doubtless the most popular of the younger school of romantic actors, is the handsome, ill-fated Loris. It is, indeed, a wonderful cast. Fedora is the most exacting part to which Miss Marie Löhr has yet addressed herself, L'Aiglon not excepted. Sardou demanded everything a great actress could give in the display of emotion—charm, and tender devotion; grief, rage, an animal ferocity of revenge, and inhuman cunning and relentlessness in its pursuit, a very dejection of remorse, and finally a painful death scene." —The Globe, November 1, 1920

"Mr. Basil Rathbone's Loris Ipanoff gathered strength and impetus as it progressed, and was a most acceptable reading of the character." —The Tatler, November 17, 1920

MISS MARIE LOHR'S FEDORA, AT THE GLOBE

Emotional roles which genius has rendered more or less classical in the playhouse are not, of course, the monopoly of an older generation. What one likes—and liked from the start—about Miss Marie Löhr's acting in "Fedora" is her honest and gallant struggle with all the phases of the heroine's complex personality. It is true that the complexities in this case are crazily absurd—that no woman could ever be, as Sardou shows Fedora, half in love with a suitor she deems an assassin, yet resolved to trick and betray him in revenge for his supposed crime. But though the plot has made the heroine here, and not the heroine the plot, and so her impersonator has throughout to fight against an audience's scepticism, it is possible for art which has sufficient abandon and intensity to secure for Fedora's double-mindedness provisional tolerance; and last Saturday evening Miss Löhr put all her heart and soul into her performance, and so gradually conquered conviction. Just at first it looked as if she might not have the physical strength for her ordeal, as if so gentle-seeming a creature could not command the illusion of implacability; this Fedora's grief was hardly tempestuous enough to augur well for the storms of emotion she had later on to encounter. But naturalness stood so natural an actress in good stead, and doubt gave place to astonishment that the thing should be so well done. The Loris, Mr. Basil Rathbone, if a little inclined to excess, is notably good in the last act. Mr. Allan Aynesworth is delightfully urbane as Jean de Siriex; and a little gem of comedy portraiture is supplied by Miss Ellis Jeffreys in a part which was once surely Lady Bancroft's.

—The Illustrated London News, November 6, 1920

"Mr. Basil Rathbone, the Loris, was a little stiff and marionnettish at the outset—as though the part were a mechanical toy as well as the play—but gradually became human, or as human as Sardou would let him be. He is a young actor of marked distinction and promise, and we shall watch his future with benevolent curiosity." —The Times, November 1, 1920

"Mr. Basil Rathbone gives a singularly sympathetic piece of acting as Loris." —The Era, November 3, 1920

"Basil Rathbone played Ipanoff quietly and gracefully, with a reserve of high explosive." —The Scotsman, November 1, 1920

"Marie Lohr and Basil Rathbone played the ill-starred lovers, gasping, at the climax, all over the stage, and throwing themselves and each other about like an acrobatic duo." —H. F., The Daily Herald, November 1, 1920

"Seemingly a little gauche and awkward at the opening of the second act, the least effective portion of the drama, Mr. Rathbone rose to the occasion finely in the description of Loris's vengeance upon the despicable Vladimir." —The Stage, November 4, 1920

"Miss Marie Löhr played the title role with sincerity and power, and Basil Rathbone as her lover maintained the high opinion already formed of his capacity." —Western Mail, November 1, 1920

"Mr. Basil Rathbone's performance of Loris Ipanoff is convincing and confirms his position as one of the best leading actors of the day." —East London Observer, November 6, 1920

Miss Löhr in Sardou's Piece at the Globe.

I have to make the humiliating confession that I had never seen "Fedora" before last Saturday night. The play had for me no pleasant association with the various famous actresses who have performed in it during the past. In some ways this is necessarily a disadvantage; criticism is always simplified by a reference to some known standard of excellence. But in other ways the fact of not having seen the piece before is an advantage. One comes to it with a virgin and unbiased mind, and from it one takes away those first impressions which are always the most vivid and generally the most surely right.

The strongest emotion that "Fedora" evoked in my bosom was one, it must be admitted, of ennui. I have rarely seen a melodrama which moved me so little. It was impossible for a single moment to believe in its reality or to feel any deep sympathy with any of the character. Their distresses are violent, but wholly theatrical and artificially produced. The disastrous ending, for example, is quite remote from real life, in which Fedora would infallibly have told her husband the truth—that she had persecuted him from a mistaken belief that he had foully murdered her former unworthy lover—and in which her husband would as infallibly have guessed it if she had not told him. The catastrophes which overtake the characters in "Fedora" do not fall on them inevitably; they are deliberately introduced by the dramatist for the sake of the violent emotional scenes he can work up from them. But a violent emotional scene that has no real justification is something by which our sympathies cannot in the nature of things be profoundly moved.

But it is a little pedantic, as well as a work of supererogation, to talk about the play when the only thing of any interest in such a production is admittedly the acting. "Fedora" offers a selection of those violently emotional parts success in which is regarded, for some rather obscure reason, as the hallmark of excellence in any actor or actress. Miss Marie Löhr's performance as the Princess Fedora herself was not a complete and unequivocal success. A past-master in the art of comedy acting, Miss Marie Löhr is not at home in the midst of passion. Nature has not meant her to ride on the whirlwind and direct the storm. She attacked the part bravely on Saturday, but did not succeed in completely subduing it. There was, to begin with, a certain monotony in her presentation of passion. It was with the same panting breathlessness, the same hissing emphasis that she portrayed the naturally varied emotions of hatred, remorse, despair, anxiety. Strong emotional acting requires all the subtlety of modulation that is demanded by comedy. The fact of emphasis is not in itself enough; there must be variety of emphasis. The other flaw in Miss Löhr's acting was a certain brusqueness and hurriedness of movement. This was particularly noticeable in the culminating scene with Mr. Basil Rathbone. During the greater part of this scene the movements of both of them were the jerky, fidgeting movements of mere worry. Tragedy demands an ampler, a more harmonious code of gesture.

The two other principal parts in the play are mainly comic in intention. Miss Ellis Jeffreys as Countess Olga, the sentimental widow with the mania for getting engaged, was admirable. Charmingly amiable silliness could not have been better acted. She was well supported by Mr. Allan Aynesworth in the part of the worldly and good-hearted diplomat Jean de Siriex.

A. L. H. [Aldous Huxley]

—The Westminster Gazette, November 1, 1920

"Basil Rathbone, as Loris, ... is a little stiff at first, but when he warms to his work he plays with contagious intensity." —The Sporting Times, November 6, 1920

"Mr. Basil Rathbone, as Ipanoff, is excellent, and acts with due calm and consciousness until the time for an outburst of frenzy is demanded of him and which stamps him as one who must make his mark." —The Observer, November 5, 1920

"Mr. Basil Rathbone as Loris is admirable in the 'strong scenes,' but Sardou himself does not allow of much character for him elsewhere." —S. R. L., Pall Mall Gazette, November 1, 1920

"Mr. Basil Rathbone was quietly effective as Ipanoff, and cleverly keyed up his rage almost high enough at the climax to make Fedora's suicide seem judicious." —R. K. R., The Yorkshire Post, November 1, 1920