What's More Sad Than Sobbing

From Lloyd Evans, in a review of John Logan's new play, Peter and Alice, comes this dry-eyed observation of something we've all noticed but perhaps never articulated:

"Alice, as an adult, recalls her sons’ deaths on the western front. This gives Dame Judi [Dench] a chance to have a good old blub. The sight of an actor giving it the full Niagara is invariably tedious to watch although reviewers are usually polite enough to call it ‘profoundly moving’ or something like that. Here’s the difficulty. Yielding to tears is an abject and finished action that disengages our interest. The attempt to defy grief, on the other hand, and to overcome tears, is a heroic and unfinished act that sustains our interest. When actors sob, drama dies."