| Title: | Helping Hands |
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| Description: | Mm. Céleste's benefit night. Helping Hands by Tom Taylor. Robert Keeley as William Rufus and 'Tilda, by his wife. |
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| 1st Performance: | Jun 20, 1855 |
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| Theatre: | Adelphi |
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| Source: | The Illustrated London News, Jul 7, 1855, p. 29 |
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| See Source: | Go to Source Images (9.5 MB) |
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| Review: | The Illustrated London News, Jul 7, 1855, pp. 29-30 |
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"HELPING HANDS" AT THE ADELPHI THEATRE.
As we have already remarked, the heroine and hero of Mr. Tom Taylor's last new
play are 'Tilda (Mrs. Keeley), and William Rufus (Mr. Keeley). Our
artist has selected these two personages for Illustration. The situation is that
of mutual recognition--the first since their separation. Both are now in a condition of honesty and have
commenced a new course of life likely to lead to a prosperous issue. Our picture,
however, can but indicate the position--it cannot explain its moral spirit. This
demands the dramatist's dialogue. Mr. Taylor's is peculiar. He is no
writer of light conversational, punning repartee, but indulges in rhetorical
demonstration. His characters talk logically. There is much that is
evidently scholastic in Mr. Taylor's composition. There
is, accordingly, considerable weight in his scenes, and the mind of the audience is set
thinking; but somehow Mr. Taylor's logic serves him instead of wit, and the philosophical
syllogism will often extort as hearty a laugh as the most exoteric jest. There is an
abundance of natural sentiment, however, at the bottom of all this brain-work, and Mr. Taylor
constantly calls in the heart in support of the head. This is particularly the
case with 'Tilda, whose benevolence is sometimes too much for her honesty; but
there is a souse of justice even in her wrong-doing which conserves her respectability.
As to Rufus, he is the very type of a shrewd, worldly-minded youth, whose knowledge
of the wrong serves to keep him in the right. He well knows the distinction between them, and is likely
to keep out of harm's way, and on occasion to overreach the duper, paying him in his own
coin, and taking the change out of him, with the high feeling of a retributive avenger.
Cunning delineations of this kind are all in Mr. Taylor's best manner; and these two
characters will doubtless act as "the salt" of this especial drama, and preserve
the more questionable portions of it from decay. In them is the real living principle;
the rest, it must be acknowledged, is somewhat too artificial for independent
existence.
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