After 10 years of oblivion, of unconcealed impatience, and as definite rejection before and after the appearance of any new attempt to capture the critics and the public, Gerhart Hauptmann has come. into his own again. The revolutionary dramatist is accepted to-day as the dramatist' of the revolution, in spite of certain pyrotechnical attempts of the young and fiery that have ended in a fine cloud of smoke, "The Weavers" has just been revived at the Grosses Schauspielhaus. A certain amount of interest is attached to the fact that in this big building, with the large arena for the better disposition of crowds. Reinhardt and his successors have definitely acknowledged themselves defeated, and returned once and for all to_ the stage as moderns know it. But the play is the thing in this case, and the presentation remarkable only for the broad lines upon which misery and revolt are portrayed, and the subsequent effect on what can only be described as a frenzied audience.
One of the young Hauptmann's most powerful pieces of self-expression, these pictures of the revolt of the Silesian weavers of the forties, might be regarded to-day as unexcelled propaganda for the spirit of revolution that is generally regarded as_ slumbering peacefully in the Berlin of the present moment. The pathos and poverty are so realistically brought home' that the very infants in arms, carried by desperate mothers, wail in the most heartrending fashion just at the most appropriate moments. The demolition of the rich manufacturer's villa is carried out with such gusto that Communists among the audience' still learning their business can only count themselves richer for the evening's experience.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.