Eleonora Duse: A Biography [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Duse (doo-ZAY) had learned the fundamentals of acting as a member of her family's troupe, a struggling, itinerant theater company that depended on each day's small income to pay for the day's bread and a bed for the night. While still quite young she had exhibited a strong empathetic imagination, among other "magic gifts" spoken of by her mother. Her unusual empathy first manifested itself in her sensing life in inanimate objects such as chairs and other household items, which she would talk to for hours at a time, asking for no reply.

When she was 14, with a decade of acting experience behind her, Duse found herself in Verona playing Juliet, a girl her own age, and she experienced an uncanny sensation of actually becoming the incarnation of Shakespeare's character. Later she would speak of the harmony she felt that day and of a state of grace through which she was united in communion with the audience. Sheehy associates this event with the Dionysian concept of acquiring power over others through surrender of the self. For the rest of her life, Sheehy says, guided by "a secret voice" that she said was "an echo of the pain of the world," Duse would seek and find this state of grace and self-abandonment.

Duse harbored a profound mistrust of language and probed deeply beneath the lines of her characters to discover --- and to portray --- what she called the invisible side of life. While Bernhardt was always Bernhardt, Duse disappeared within her characters, and although she always spoke her lines in Italian, she communicated their thoughts and feelings in ways so surpassingly subtle and yet so clear that her audiences seemed always to understand --- without understanding why.

Duse wore no jewelry and her costumes were always simple and austere, much alike in color and line from role to role. Nor did she wear makeup, which in her view amounted to a mask. As it was, responding naturally to incidents affecting the character she played, she startled audiences by suddenly becoming deathly pale or blushing brightly, according to circumstances.

It was seeing Duse onstage that inspired the great Russian director and teacher Stanislavsky to establish the famed Moscow Art Theatre, and to his students he always said her acting represented the ideal toward which they should strive. At a time when Stanislavsky was working to "codify" Duse's art, to identify a method by which to "reproduce" a character night after night, Duse was achieving something far greater, Sheehy says. She was creating a new woman, a new human being, in performance after performance. In this sense, she never repeated herself and never needed or wanted to reproduce what she had accomplished earlier.

Duse refused to portray women as they were conventionally represented on the stage. She wanted to reveal to audiences "the immense gap between accepted ideas of woman and what a woman really was." Among the plays in which she found this opportunity were La Dame aux camélias and Le Demi-Monde, by Alexandre Dumas fils, who felt deep sympathy, as Duse did, for unmarried mothers and illegitimate children and who championed divorce and paternity laws. Plays of Henrik Ibsen, such as A Doll's House, naturally became part of her repertory, and so did works by the poet and novelist Gabriele d'Annunzio, with whom she was for a time romantically involved.

Mention of Duse's relationship with d'Annunzio suggests another point that ought to be made --- that this biography, unlike many biographies, is essentially a very good story, a story that Sheehy allows to unfold naturally, without unnecessary intrusions. Her analysis is everywhere clear and concise, as it is always interesting and enlightening, the product of wide and thoughtful reading.

Though Sheehy, unlike Duse, is necessarily limited to words, she has produced a biography that enables readers to come as close as one could reasonably expect to both the visible and the invisible worlds of an actress who may have been simply the best.

--- Reviewed by Harold V. Cordry

I had never heard of Duse before Sheehy's work, yet the author makes a convincing argument why the Italian actress is one of the founders of modern acting - a woman who presented a powerful, natural style of acting that George Bernard Shaw, Charlie Chapin, and John Barrymore found overwhelming to behold. Duse created a compelling counterpoint to the highly stylized form perfected by Sarah Bernhardt and she presented a standard of a new acting for all performers in the twentieth century to emulate. Today, we are unaware as we watch film or television, that we are watching Duse's heirs.

Sheehy goes beyond her central thesis of Duse's acting career to describe a very flawed woman. Sheehy enumerates Duse's poor choices in lovers, her neglect of her daughter because of the girl's physical resemblance to Duse's discarded husband, her indulgence in self-pity and hypochondria, and her manipulative use of society friends for favors and loans. Sheehy does not shy away from her hero's defects, but neither does she wallow in them.

This book is of obvious value to people of the theatre or with special interest in Italian culture. For the general reader, it is an artful biography of a compelling and important cultural figure.