The Lighting of the Christmas Tree
9781465674494
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The beautiful Swedish national costumes should be used for this play. Any good reference book on the costumes of various nations and many books about travel in Sweden will furnish illustrations that may be copied, varying the colors when necessary to produce a harmonious relation with one another. Since this is a modern play, only the servants, who are, of course, peasants, would be likely to wear these costumes on ordinary occasions, but members of the upper classes sometimes assume them for the festivities of the Christmas season. We may, therefore, take advantage of this possibility, to increase the picturesqueness of our play by using the colorful Swedish dress for all the characters. A real Swedish interior, carefully reproduced from trustworthy illustrations, would also be effective. Not all the furniture found in any illustration should, of course, be used for the stage setting. A few pieces only should be chosen, with a view to composing without unnecessary “clutter” into a beautiful and characteristically Swedish whole. The lines of this play are exceptionally simple in their phrasing and yet so full of meaning that no word or syllable should be lost by the audience. An intelligent, sympathetic rendering of each speech is especially important, but clear-cut enunciation and a beautiful quality of voice are also very desirable, particularly for Olga, Liljekrona and the two children. Olga is obviously the very heart of this play. She makes a charming picture with the little boys over the Christmas tree, the candle-lighting in the windows, and the story of the Christ-Child’s wanderings. Her tender love for her home and her instinctive fear of any influence which may tend to lower its ideals or to draw Liljekrona away from it, must be so clearly brought out in the acting (as it is in the lines) that the audience will understand and even partially sympathize with her anxiety to be rid of the drunken vagrant, Ruster. This anxiety is sharpened by the approach of the Christmas season, which she feels should be celebrated as a beautiful home festival, just by themselves. But even as Olga carries her point and Ruster is about to leave the house, she is assailed by remorse for the selfish impulse to protect her home at the unfortunate old man’s expense. This should be clearly indicated in the tone and manner with which she asks Liljekrona to give Ruster something extra for Christmas and to lend him his fur coat. The departure of Ruster ends the first stage of the play’s action, in which Olga has attempted to secure happiness for herself and her household by the refusal of her hospitality to some one in sore need of it. Ruster had seemed to her a discordant element when present, but his absence seems to bring ten-fold more unhappiness. All the Christmas preparations go wrong. Sigurd’s cookie-dough figure of the Christ-Child “doesn’t look like anything,” the E string of Liljekrona’s fiddle has snapped and he has no new one, Torstein has gone to drive Ruster and they cannot dance without him, the sheaves for the sparrows have been forgotten, and finally Liljekrona withdraws to his own room to play the stormy music which Olga understands as a portent of his return to the old life of wandering. In this section of the play, Liljekrona controls the action and should dominate the scene. Olga attempts, in vain, to infuse joy into the Christmas observances. Liljekrona’s bitterly self-reproachful speech about the lonely and the hungry people,—“When they pass so close as to touch our sleeve,—we do not see them, we do not stop them, but let them plod their path alone,”—shows that he will no longer deceive himself as to the heartlessness of their own action. And when he says—“Your candles are too late. The door is closed. The voice is gone,”—Olga sees that on the eve of Christmas and in the name of its fitting observance, she has betrayed its very spirit of hospitality and kindness.
