We went to the Ruth Draper matinee. A packed and putrid matinee audience at the Garrick, nearly all women. Laughing in all the wrong places - giggling, whispering. Tea-drinking. Ruth is very clever. She is a wonderful imitator, but not much of a creator. Some things however, such as the Englishwoman showing her garden were splendidly cruel. Others feeble and formless. The observation seems to be exact but superficial. She is highly skilled and looks nice.
Ruth Draper (1884 -1956), American monologuist and monodramatist whose art was acclaimed throughout the United States and Europe. Draper was of a well-to-do family. Her career grew from a habit of writing sketches about persons she knew or had observed and performing them at parties. In 1911 she began performing professionally at clubs and schools. In 1917 Draper made her New York debut as a monologuist in a programme of one-act pieces, all of which were failures except for the one she had written entitled The Actress. She thereafter performed only her own material. Her London debut in 1920 in a bill of her own works was a great success and established her as the pre-eminent practitioner of her art. Draper’s monologues and monodramas were delicately crafted works that revealed a deep understanding of human character, which she conveyed with great skill and deft suggestion. She used a minimum of stage props, no scenery, and little in the way of costume change, yet she could people the stage at will. Her repertory eventually grew to 39 pieces with such titles as Three Generations at a Court of Domestic Relations, At an English House Party, The Miner’s Wife, A French Dressmaker, Opening a Bazaar, In County Kerry, The Italian Lesson, At an Art Exhibition, and Vive La France. In them she conjured up some 58 principal characters, endowing each with full individuality. A command of languages and dialects played a large part in her characterizations as well.
"Under Satan's Sun", by Georges Bernanos is a powerful account of intense spiritual struggle that reflects the author's deeply-felt religion. The work develops a theme that persistently inspired Bernanos: the existence of evil as a spiritual force and its dramatic role in human destiny. This haunting novel follows the fortunes of a young, gauche, and fervent Catholic priest who is a misfit in the world and in his church, creating scandal and disharmony wherever he turns. His insight into the inner lives of others and his perception of the workings of Satan in the everyday are gifts that fatefully come into play in the priest's chance encounter with a young murderess, whose life and emotions he can see with a dreadful clarity, and whose destiny inexorably becomes entangled with his own. A film based on the novel won the Palme d'Or prize at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival.
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