It was such a change from the hard, ethical, slightly mechanized
characters in the German play, which was as perfect an interpretation as
I can imagine, to the rather pathetic notion of the Italian peasants,
that I had to wait to adjust myself.
The mother was a pleasant, comfortable woman harassed by something, she
did not quite know what. The pastor was a ginger-haired caricature
imitated from the northern stage, quite a lay figure. The peasants never
laughed, they watched solemnly and absorbedly like children. The servant
was just a slim, pert, forward hussy, much too flagrant. And then the
son, the actor-manager: he was a dark, ruddy man, broad and thick-set,
evidently of peasant origin, but with some education now; he was the
important figure, the play was his.
And he was strangely disturbing. Dark, ruddy, and powerful, he could not
be the blighted son of 'Ghosts', the hectic, unsound, northern issue of
a diseased father. His flashy Italian passion for his half-sister was
real enough to make one uncomfortable: something he wanted and would
have in spite of his own soul, something which fundamentally he did
not want.
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