Diplomacy

=====A Short History of the Drama by Martha Fletcher Bellinger; H. Holt and Company, 1927=====

Victorien Sardou, 1831-1908: Wrote more than forty plays, among them Dora (in English called Diplomacy)

=====American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1869-1914 by Gerald Bordman; Oxford University Press, 1994=====

Diplomacy ( 4-1- 78), Wallack's), was taken from Sardou's Dora by Clement Scott and B. C. Stephenson, writing as Saville and Bolton Rowe. The Countess Zicka ( Rose Coghlan), a Russian spy who has had a passionate affair with Julian Beauclerc ( H. J. Montague), turns furious and vengeful when she learns Julian has dropped her to marry Dora de Rio Zares ( Maude Granger), a woman of very modest means. She steals a secret document in Julian's possession and plants it in a letter that Dora has sent innocently to another informer, her mother's friend, the German diplomat Baron Stein ( J. W. Shannon). Exacerbating the suspicions thrown on Dora are the fact that her mother is rumored to be a spy and that a photograph of Count Orloff ( Frederic Robinson), which the. count had once given to Dora, is the very photograph used to identify and arrest him. Orloff, not aware that Julian has married Dora, reveals all this to his friend and then, learning of the marriage, attempts gallantly to exculpate the wife. Julian and his brother, Henry ( Lester Wallack), browbeat the German into returning the correspondence, and Countess Zicka's guilt is brought to light. The taut writing and the polished ensemble playing were framed in superb settings, including a Monte Carlo apartment with a view of the shimmering Mediterranean in the distance. So excellent were the sets that, as often happened at the time, the scene painters were called forth to take bows of their own. The play ran until Wallack's season ended in mid-June. It held the stage regularly until World War I and was given a major revival on Broadway in 1928.