The Project Gutenberg eBook of Continental stagecraft
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Title: Continental stagecraft
Author: Robert Edmund Jones
Kenneth MacGowan
Release date: January 8, 2024 [eBook #72655]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922
Credits: Bob Taylor, Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONTINENTAL STAGECRAFT ***
Transcriber’s Note
Italic text displayed as: _italic_
_BY KENNETH MACGOWAN
THE THEATRE OF TO-MORROW._
[Illustration:
The Redoutensaal, a great and splendid eighteenth-century ballroom in
the Hofburg in Vienna, with an arrangement of curved walls, staircases
and platforms newly built into one end. Here, under the light of
crystal chandeliers, surrounded by the baroque beauty of Maria
Theresa’s palace, audience and players unite in a relationship freed
from all the associations of modern stage-setting, a relationship
essentially theatrical in the newest and the oldest sense of the
word. The stage is here shown cleared of all but a few chairs for the
wedding scene in Mozart’s _The Marriage of Figaro_.
]
CONTINENTAL
STAGECRAFT
KENNETH MACGOWAN
ROBERT EDMOND JONES
[Illustration: Decoration]
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO THE
PLAYWRIGHTS
OF AMERICA
Certain of the chapters and illustrations of _Continental Stagecraft_
have appeared in _Vanity Fair_, _The Century Magazine_, _Arts and
Decoration_, _The Bookman_, _The Theatre Magazine_, _Harper’s Bazaar_,
_The Theatre Arts Magazine_, _The Freeman_, and _Shadowland_.
PREFATORY NOTE
This book is a record of impressions gained from ten weeks of travel
through the theaters of France, Sweden, Germany, Czecho-Slovakia, and
Austria during April, May, and June, 1922. These impressions are partly
reinforced, partly orientated, through previous visits to Paris and
London, and through a long sojourn of Mr. Jones in Germany just before
the war.
For the purposes of this book, the journey excluded England, because
observation and reliable report showed little there that was not
a faint echo of what was to be found on the Continent. Russia was
regretfully excluded for reasons of time and the difficulties of
travel; but fortunately we were able to see in Stockholm a performance
by the touring company of the Moscow Art Theater. Though the most
interesting evenings of our trip were spent in the Redoutensaal in
Vienna, and in the Vieux-Colombier and the Cirque Medrano in Paris,
the larger part of our time was passed in Germany, and the greater
number of illustrations come from productions seen there. In Berlin, in
particular, there were things to be seen which had been much discussed
by American visitors—_Masse-Mensch_, the Grosses Schauspielhaus, and
the work of Leopold Jessner,—and these, we felt, demanded lengthy
study and analysis.
In our ten weeks Mr. Jones and I saw close to sixty performances. We
had expected to find it difficult, if not impossible, to see in this
time as much as we should have liked of the really significant new
work of the Continental theater. But, as it happened, good fortune
and the great courtesy shown us everywhere enabled us to see almost
everything that we wished. Through special performances arranged by
the managements of the Royal Swedish Opera and the Berlin Volksbühne,
and by Jacques Copeau, director of the Vieux-Colombier, we saw half a
dozen most important productions which we might otherwise have missed.
Luck and the repertory system found us at various German theaters
in time to witness the most characteristic and significant work of
the past few years. Finally, we were fortunate enough to come upon
two theaters—one accomplished, the other potential—of extraordinary
interest and importance, which had not as yet been seen or discussed by
American visitors, the Redoutensaal in Vienna and the Cirque Medrano in
Paris. _Continental Stagecraft_ cannot pretend to be so exhaustive a
study as a year’s visit would have made possible, but, in view of the
exceptional circumstances, I think that it is more than proportionately
representative.
With the exception of one sketch of a supposititious production in the
Cirque Medrano, the illustrations show exactly what we saw and nothing
else. Mr. Jones’s drawings are in themselves a kind of criticism
which the modern theater stands much in need of. They give the actual
visual quality of the best productions on the Continental stage far
better than could photographs of settings and actors, which are usually
flashlights innocent of the atmosphere produced by the stage lighting,
or the designs of the scenic artists, which are sometimes imperfectly
realized and sometimes bettered in actual production. Mr. Jones made
his drawings as soon as might be after the performance, working from
many rough notes made during the progress of the play. They are, I
believe, uncommonly true to the impression gained by the audience. My
only reservation would be that they catch the scene and the lighting
always at the best moment, and, through the quality of the drawing,
they sometimes add a beauty that is perhaps a little flattering to the
original.
The text is a collaboration in ideas, though not, with the exception of
the captions under the pictures, in writing. It is a compilation of our
impressions, reactions, and conclusions. Because the words are my own,
I have taken the liberty of the personal pronoun “I” when “we” would be
editorially pompous or inexact.
The book began as an attempt to supplement the International Theater
Exhibition held in Amsterdam and London during the first half of
1922. This large, varied, and arresting collection of sketches and
models showed the art of the theater largely as it existed in the
imaginations of the stage designers. Many of these sketches were for
productions never made, some had been greatly altered for better or
for worse in the course of production. It was our feeling that we
might be able to add something to the knowledge which this important
exhibition was spreading abroad if we could make some record, however
incomplete, of the actual accomplishment of the artists upon the stage,
and particularly of the directors and actors, who, after all, have the
major share in the art of the theater.
We have seen so much that is interesting, so much that is significant,
and a few things so stimulating and inspiriting, that we have been
tempted often to push our report of impressions into an anticipation of
future progress. We have, I fear, substituted our own imaginations in
many places for those of the artists of the International Exhibition.
KENNETH MACGOWAN.
Pelham Manor, N. Y.,
1 August, 1922.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFATORY NOTE vii
CHAPTER
I. BEYOND REALISM 3
Some dull definitions. Realism of the flesh vs. Realism of the
spirit. In _The Cherry Orchard_ Tchehoff and the Moscow Art
Theater reach reality. A mystic picture of life beyond our
Realism.
II. THE LIVING STAGE 17
The art that lies closest to life. Because its materials are living
men and women, it should not seek the illusion of reality. Its
object is to achieve the Form of life.
III. THE PATH OF THE PLAY 27
From Realism through Expressionism. The attempts of Ibsen,
Tchehoff, Wedekind, and Strindberg to reflect the Form of life.
The expressionist movement in the German theater; its violence,
morbidity and failure. Its arresting significance. Some
examples of its vitality. Expressionism and the unconscious
Through Form to beauty.
IV. BLACK CURTAINS 40
The place of Germany in the theater. Its pioneering past and
its natural virtues and failings. A beaten and bruised people
that still makes a fine audience. Berlin becomes Broadway-ized
and morbid. Economy breeds simplicity. A new day dawns on
a black-curtained stage.
V. THE TWILIGHT OF THE MACHINES 54
Relics of the past which was once the future. The abdication
of the designers, Stern and Roller. Reinhardt seeks a new
way out. Linnebach, apostle of the machine, turns apostate.
“_Einfach_” and “_Podium_” the catch-words. Stage machinery
sinks into its place. The designer replaces the mechanician.
VI. LIGHT AS SETTING 68
From Appia’s theories of the ’nineties to the day of projected
scenery. Lamps of six thousand candle-power. Color comes
under control. The dome no longer a sky; a neutral boundary
in Jessner’s _Othello_, a void in _Masse-Mensch_, a wall to be
painted with light in a Stockholm ballet. Settings projected by
Linnebach and Hasait. Light as a dramatic _motif_.
VII. THE GERMAN ACTOR 81
The effect of the war on the German players. The break-up
of Reinhardt’s exceptional company under the pressure of war
and the motion picture. The _Festspiel_ brings them together
again. Ensemble persists in Vienna and Munich. _The S. S.
Tenacity_ as played at the Burgtheater in Vienna and at the
Vieux-Colombier. The players of the Munich State theaters.
Teutonic vitality and intensity which often become violence.
VIII. NEW ACTING FOR OLD 91
Four styles of acting: Impersonation by wigs and spirit, as
practiced by the Moscow Art Theater. Impersonation by type-casting.
The exploitation of personality by great actors.
Presentational acting, and the expository performances of the
Vieux-Colombier.
IX. THE REINHARDT TRADITION 106
In the search for the director who can fuse the new acting
and the new play we come first upon Max Reinhardt. His past
and his present. His virtues and his faults. Powerful theatricalism
in the best sense possible in the old theater. His influence
and his followers. His future.
X. THE ARTIST AS DIRECTOR 118
The advent of the artist in the theater, a functionary unknown
to Molière or Shakespeare. The designer as an originator of
directional ideas. The inevitable union of director and artist,
in the sceneryless theater of the future.
XI. A NEW ADVENTURE IN DIRECTION 130
The methods of the director of the State Theater in Berlin.
The steps and levels upon which he moves his players in
three-dimensional compositions. How he creates effective pictures
and significant groupings in _Richard III_, _Othello_ and
_Napoleon_. Distortion of natural action to make points. The
motionless actor. Arbitrary lighting. A. B. C. conceptions
and limited vision.
XII. MASSE-MENSCH—MOB-MAN 144
Jürgen Fehling of the Volksbühne adds understanding to Jessner’s
freedom and vigor. A drama of industrial revolution
produced in abstract terms and made immensely moving.
Scenery almost disappears and a workmen’s hall becomes a
flight of steps surrounded by blackness. Arbitrary light and a
chorus that speaks as one. Audience, players and play pass
through the black purgatory of revolutionary Germany.
XIII. “THE THEATER OF THE FIVE THOUSAND” 157
Reinhardt’s Grosses Schauspielhaus, the gigantic compromise between
the Greek Theater, the circus and the realistic stage,
in which he made his last effort towards a new type of production.
The failures of the building architecturally. Its
virtues and its possibilities, which the withdrawal of Reinhardt
has left unrealized.
XIV. THE THEATER OF THE THREE HUNDRED 171
Jacques Copeau’s Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris. The
naked stone stage with permanent setting which Copeau and
Jouvet created in their search for a playhouse that should
give the actor full freedom. Three productions: _Les Frères
Karamazov_, _Le Paquebot Tenacity_, _Twelfth Night_. The
quality of writer or expositor in Copeau’s performances. The
future of this theater.
XV. THE REDOUTENSAAL—A PLAYHOUSE OF PERMANENCE 184
The Redoutensaal of Marie Theresa converted by the Austrian
government into a theater without proscenium, machinery or
scenery. Audience and actors lit by crystal chandeliers and
surrounded by Gobelins and a permanent setting of baroque
architecture. Mozart and Reinhardt bring to it an old and a
new theatricalism. The principle applied to the stage and the
plays of to-day.
XVI. THE CIRQUE MEDRANO 198
The little circus on Montmartre as a presage of a theater in
which the audience will surround the players and gain a new
relationship with the play. The attempts of Reinhardt and
Gémier at the circus-theater. _Hamlet_ or _Masse-Mensch_ in the
Medrano.
XVII. THE OLD SPIRIT—THE NEW THEATER 213
Seeking both the new theater and the old spirit, Reinhardt invades
the church. The Cuckoo Theater. Religion in the
terms of the theater a thing of vital and creative spirit in Greek
times and in the Middle Ages. Can the artist of the theater
bring it out of our material age?
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
IN COLOR
The Redoutensaal in Vienna _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
He Who Gets Slapped—A Pitoëff Production 24
Die Meistersinger—Setting by Roller 56
Faust—A Reinhardt Production Designed by Stern 108
Samson and Delilah—Setting by Grünewald 120
Richard III—A Jessner Production Designed by Pirchan 140
Masse-Mensch—A Fehling Production Designed by Strohbach 156
The Redoutensaal in Vienna—Scene from The Marriage of Figaro 186
IN HALF-TONE
The Cherry Orchard—A Stanislavsky Production 10
Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen—Setting by Sievert 32
Der Traum, ein Leben—Setting by Strohbach 44
Macbeth—An André Production 54
Der Schatzgräber—Setting by Pirchan 60
Das Rheingold—Setting by Linnebach and Pasetti 64
Das Rheingold: Valhalla 76
Maria Stuart: Westminster—A Weichert Production Designed by
Sievert 112
Maria Stuart: Fotheringay 114
Samson and Delilah—Setting by Grünewald 122
Uncle Vanya—A Pitoëff Production 124
Napoleon—A Jessner Production Designed by Klein 126
Othello: Before Brabantio’s House—a Jessner Production Designed
by Pirchan 128
Othello: The Handkerchief 130
Othello: Cyprus, the Castle 132
Othello: Roderigo Is Wounded 134
Richard III—A Jessner Production Designed by Pirchan 136
Richard III: Richard and His Shadow 138
Richard III: Richmond and His Army 142
Richard III: Richard’s Soliloquy 144
Richard III: Richmond’s Soliloquy 146
Masse-Mensch: Dream-picture, a Courtyard—A Fehling Production
Designed by Strohbach 148
Masse-Mensch: The Revolutionists’ Meeting 150
Masse-Mensch: The Rallying 152
Masse-Mensch: The Machine Guns 154
The Grosses Schauspielhaus: An Impression 164
Judith—At the Grosses Schauspielhaus 168
Les Frères Karamazov—A Copeau Production Designed by Jouvet 174
Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement—A Copeau Production Designed by
Jouvet 180
The Redoutensaal: A Scene from The Barber of Seville 190
The Cirque Medrano: An Impression 206
The Cirque Medrano: A Supposition 208
CONTINENTAL STAGECRAFT
CONTINENTAL STAGECRAFT
CHAPTER I
BEYOND REALISM
It is a pity to begin a book by being dull. But a time of change is
upon us in the theater, and a time of change is a time for definitions.
We have passed through such times before, and we have come out after
some years—a century or so—with categories neatly fixed. We can look
back along the history of English literature and place a judicial
finger there and there and there and say Middle English, Classicism,
Romanticism. All this is pretty well set. Then we come to Realism
and its quagmires—quagmires of balked creation and quagmires of
discussion—and we wallow about gesticulating and shouting and splashing
the mud into our immortal eyes. What is this bog we have been so busy
in? And what is the fitful and rather blinding storm of illumination
which plays about the horizon and calls itself Expressionism?
Of course these things are just what we care to make them. Various
parties to the argument choose various definitions—the kinds that suit
their themes. I claim no more for mine than that they will make clear
what I am talking about, and save a certain amount of futile dispute.
There are plenty of sources of confusion in discussions about art. To
begin with, it is not an easy thing to limit a dynamic organism by
definition. Creative efforts in drama, fiction or painting run out
of one category and into another with distressing ease. More than
that, there are apt to be many parts to a whole, many divisions to
a category; and the parts or the divisions can be extraordinarily
different. Finally, fanatics and tea-table gossips are equally
unscrupulous when it comes to “proving” a point. They make the
definitions of friends and foes mean what they like. They take the
part for the whole, the division for the category. They pin down a
lively and meandering work of art at just the place where they want
it. Two disputants, bent on exhibiting the more indecent side of human
intelligence, can make the twilight of discussion into a pit of black
confusion.
Let us bring the thing down to the present quarrel in the theater: the
quarrel with Realism, which has moments of clarity; the quarrel with
Expressionism, which is murky as hell.
What are we going to mean when we talk about Realism? So far as this
book goes, the word Realism means a way of looking at life which came
into vogue about fifty years ago. It sees truth as representation.
It demands a more or less literal picture of people and happenings.
It insists that human beings upon the stage shall say or do only
those things that are reasonably plausible in life. Resemblance is
not always its end, but resemblance is a test that must be satisfied
before any other quality may be admitted. Realism is not, of course, a
matter of trousers, silk hats, and machinery. The realistic attitude
can invade the sixteenth century, as it does in Hauptmann’s _Florian
Geyer_. Trousers, silk hats, and machinery can be the properties of a
non-realistic play like O’Neill’s _The Hairy Ape_. The test of Realism,
as the term is here employed, is the test of plausibility: Would men
and women talk in this fashion in real life under the conditions of
time, place, and action supplied by the playwright? It is the business
of the realistic playwright to draw as much as possible of inner truth
to the surface without distorting the resemblance to actuality.
There should not be a great deal to quarrel about in such a definition
of Realism, though its adherents may deny hotly the natural assertion
that the method of Realism is barren either in whole or in part. At
any rate, people generally understand what the row is about, and the
disputants can kick up only about so much dust on this battle-field.
Non-realism is another matter.
That the thing is the opposite of Realism is obvious in just one
respect: It does not admit the test of resemblance. It denies in
the theater, as furiously as do the works of Cézanne or Picasso
in the picture gallery, the validity of representation. But what
will it substitute for the technique of Realism and what will it
call the substitute? It will go back to romantic periods for a free
technique, but it will look forward for its materials along paths which
psychological research has lately opened to men and women outside the
ranks of true poetic genius. By this it may arrive at the inner truth
of Shelley and Goethe, Shakespeare and Æschylus, while it sacrifices
the outer truth of Ibsen and Bataille, Pinero and Galsworthy. The
question is both of technique and of materials, for an inner truth is
to be found in a study of the unconscious mind which will not brook the
obstructions of actuality and resemblance. Inner truth is so much more
important than actuality that the new type of drama will not bother
itself to achieve both, and if one must infringe on the other—which
must happen in almost every case—then it chooses quickly and fearlessly
the inner truth.
To give this anti-Realism a name involves confusions dear to the heart
of the controversialist. To give it the name Expressionism multiplies
these confusions. Yet it is hard to see any alternative at the moment.
We must embrace the name—and the confusions.
The chief confusion is due to the fact that there are two kinds of
Expressionism, as there are doubtless two kinds of Realism. There
is the larger and there is the smaller. Realism can be a mere
technique—resemblance; and it can also be a resemblance through which
you catch a vision of the soul. Expressionism can be seen by the
friends of Realism only as the narrow, neurotic, violent, and formless
art which displays itself in the dramas of the new German writers like
Georg Kaiser. I should be prepared to defend this sort of Expressionism
against the Realism of Augustus Thomas or even of John Galsworthy;
but I should not admit that it was the end of the reaction against
resemblance. Expressionism may be applied—and for the purposes of this
book it shall be applied—to the whole tendency against Realism, just as
Romanticism is applied to the whole tendency against Classicism. Many
who dislike Realism and neurotic German Expressionism equally, prefer
to give the form they seek some such well-worn and inoffensive label
as Poetry. This finickiness doesn’t matter—except as it admits new
confusions and dodges the issue. This issue is plain and should be kept
plain. Realism, in any but a very extraordinary sense, is a cramp upon
art. Instinctively artists of the theater are beginning to recognize
this and to seek some way out. This involves new qualities in the play.
For practical purposes let us call the way of escape Expressionism.
Some other term may establish itself in the course of years, but for
the moment this is all we have.
It is fairly easy to apply these terms and definitions to the current
theater—if you are not too doctrinaire or too partizan. Realism
yawningly enfolds ninety-nine out of a hundred playwrights. Maeterlinck
and D’Annunzio require a little special attention and Shaw and Barrie
raise nice points. But, in general, the distinction holds; resemblance
shepherds the realistic plays, emanations of the unconscious guide us
to the expressionistic. Even the purely representational performances
which most of our actors and directors give do not always succeed in
hiding the cleavage.
The most startling and disturbing experience that any friend of
Expressionism can have is to sit through a performance of Tchehoff’s
_The Cherry Orchard_ by the Moscow Art Theater—even by that portion of
Stanislavsky’s celebrated company which was cut off by Wrangel’s army
while playing in Southern Russia and compelled to tour Europe for two
years before repatriation was possible. Here is a play of a generation
ago written by the man whose dramas were the cornerstone of success for
the world’s greatest realistic theater. It is a _genre_ study almost
without plot: decayed aristocrats, old servants, newly-rich peasants
and the incident of the sale for debt of an ancestral property. There
is no more violence in it than the violence of life which rots an oak.
There is no more distortion than is to be expected in light reflected
from the troubled surface of life. And it is played with an almost
utter perfection of realistic detail, complete impersonation, and
rounded ensemble.
Yet if this is Realism we have never known Realism in our theater.
It carries us through life and out on the other side. It drenches us
with a mystic sense of existence. And when we read the text of the
play and separate it from the extraordinary emotional actuality of the
performance, we discover again and again and again speech that drives
straight at free expression instead of resemblance, and action and
character permeated with an almost religious symbolism. All this fused
by playwright and players into what seems a work of the most perfect
resemblance, but what is actually only the appearance of appearance.
The surface of the play is the surface of life. Mme. Ranevsky has
returned to her estates after a turmoil of years in France. There are
the usual appendages: a daughter, an adopted daughter, a governess,
a housemaid, a major-domo, and a man-servant who have grown into the
life of the house, a brother, an old, impoverished friend, a village
clerk with his eye on the maid-servant, an up-and-coming merchant
whose grandfather was a serf on the estate. These people talk a great
deal, and in talking they make certain matters plain. One of these is
that no one can save the estate, the beautiful cherry orchard, from
the consequences of the family temperament. Madame and her brother
have always spent their money as becomes gentlefolk, and some one has
forgotten the secret of how the cherries used to be dried and sent
to the markets of the far cities every year. They flounder about in
self-deception, always hoping for succor, never willing to accept
the scheme of the friendly merchant for cutting the estate up into
villa lots, and never able to do anything themselves to save it from
the auctioneer. Ultimately the merchant buys it in, and in blissful
callousness puts the ax to the trees as the family leave the old house.
Out of these people and their dilemma rises the most curious and moving
symbolism. A suggestion of symbols, rather; for there is nothing bald
about it. Truths of Russian temperament, even Russian politics, are
figured with the hidden yet revealing quality that so often rises out
of life like an odor from old fields, freighted with memories and
anticipations. Perhaps the simplest and most moving example of this
comes at the very end of the play. Through it all has moved a mumbling,
bent old man who has been the loving guardian of the household for
two generations, one of those rare and ancient servants who, by sheer
servility, have lifted themselves out of servantage and into a share in
the family life. In the end, the house is sold, the furniture removed,
the shutters closed. The family depart. Then into the dim room comes
the old man, forgotten. He totters across to the derelict sofa that has
been left behind. He curls up on it like some old leaf. There in the
darkness he dies. The soul of old Russia.
[Illustration:
Realistic production at its best. The final moment of Tchehoff’s _The
Cherry Orchard_ as produced by the touring company of the Moscow Art
Theatre. The ancestral house has been sold, curtains and pictures
have been taken down, the furniture is shrouded. The shutters are
closed. The lights are so dim that the room is no longer a room but a
vague, brooding presence. The old servant gropes his way through the
darkness, crawls upon the couch and dies.
]
As the old man dies something occurs that gives us all the license
we need in order to see in other portions of the play methods and
attitudes far indeed from Realism. The stage directions read: “A
distant sound is heard, as if from the sky, and the sound of a string
breaking, dying away, melancholy.” It is a sound that occurs also in
the second act, unexplained, ominous. Symbolism. Arbitrary and very
expressive sounds from heaven. Is it at all surprising to find the
characters of this play indulging in lengthy accounts of their lives
without taking the least trouble to find some stranger who might
plausibly be ignorant of it all?
Perhaps this is Realism, perhaps not. Certainly it is both sharp with
actuality and mystic with life’s intensity as these Russian players
act it. The company did not contain the greatest of the group which
Stanislavsky has gathered about him since he opened his theater in
1897. The director himself was not there to play the maundering
brother. On this night Kachaloff was out of the cast. But Mme. Knipper,
the widow of Tchehoff, played Mme. Ranevsky, and P. A. Pavloff played
the old servant. How many of the other players acted parts long
familiar to them I cannot say; but their work gave the impression not
only of exceptionally fine individual performances but of an ensemble
long and lovingly built up into perfection. It is an old _cliché_ as
well as a sad comment on acting as an art to say that a player does
not _play_ a character but literally _is_ the character. In the case
of this company from the Moscow Art Theater, there is a deep intensity
in the performance and a frank desire for absolute impersonation
which make such a comment on their playing of _The Cherry Orchard_
the obvious and revealing truth. It is a comment that applies to the
ensemble as much as to the individual acting.
The wedding of an utterly realistic performance with a play of
mystic overtones is justified by the sense of an old and complete
life which both possess. The intimacy of the actors with one another
is as evident as the intimacy of the characters they play, and the
intimacy of masters and servants in this Russian family. The welcome
of the mistress on her return may be a matter of the clever rehearsal
of off-stage noise—amazingly clever, you can believe; but when this
adoration comes out of the wings and walks upon the stage, it is seen
as the perfection of emotion and impersonation. A performance in so
foreign a tongue as Russian gains because our eager imagination is at
work to interpret in the acting the gaps left by the lack of words.
It also loses, because the meaning of the play is not always there
to show the linking of character and character, and of incident and
incident; great spaces of action are blank and without emotion; we
carry away fewer and shorter memories. How many and how continuous,
however, are the memories of this performance, and how piercingly keen
are the sharpest of them! Mme Knipper: a welling flood of emotion at
the old nursery of her childhood; blind affection for the lovely,
ancient orchard; childlike prodigality in her gesture as she scatters
money that might once have saved the estate, followed by childlike
penitence; and then the moment when she hears at last that the orchard
is sold, when her ability to ignore and forget slips from her and she
turns old before our eyes. Pavloff, prince of impersonators of old
men, hobbling about the room; a bent and shuffling figure eternally
mumbling, eternally nursing; a watery-eyed kiss for madame’s hand, a
pat for the twisted collar of the brother, a touch to the turn of a
curtain; an old, old, devoted shape speaking its fullness of character
in every movement. Other figures almost as fully felt and seen. Each
one doing the least little thing with an arresting significance. Here
for once are actors who realize the importance of crossing a stage, as
a display not of themselves but of their characters. Here, equally,
are actors who have got by all the small egoisms of their kind. It
is said that Stanislavsky found his players among artists, writers,
students, shopkeepers, anywhere but in “the profession.” At any rate
in twenty years he has made them into selfless but distinguished parts
of a new organism. Their intimacy as people must be as great as the
intimacy which they give their characters on the stage. They are an
orchestra; their playing is a music, a harmony. They seem to have lived
into this play in the eighteen years that they have given it until now
they are part one of another. It does not matter that some may have
had their rôles only five years, perhaps only five months. They are
enveloped in the mother-liquor of this mature, well-aged performance.
You recall the stew that Anatole France described: “To be good it must
have been cooking lengthily upon a gentle fire. Clemence’s stew has
been cooking for twenty years. She puts into the pot sometimes goose or
bacon, sometimes sausage or beans, but it is always the same stew. The
foundation endures; this ancient and precious foundation gives the stew
the quality that in the pictures of old Venetian masters you find in
the women’s flesh.”
Such Realism as this of the Moscow Art Theater compares most curiously
with the best we know of realistic acting in the productions of David
Belasco and Arthur Hopkins. It has the care and minutiæ of Belasco
sharpened by far greater ability on the part of players and director,
and mellowed by time. It has the naturalness of Hopkins; but, because
it is secured by deliberate direction and not by the indirection of the
American’s method, the naturalness fits into a general design and is
never slipshod. (So far Stanislavsky denies life and its accidents!)
It is, of course, worse than futile to compare such acting with our
own for any purpose but understanding. We cannot achieve a performance
of this kind so long as we have no permanent companies, no repertory
system. It is not alone a matter of the leisurely method of production
which Stanislavsky can employ,—months spent in study of the script,
long readings and discussions over every character. Repertory keeps
the actors playing a piece for years. They are not repeating themselves
evening after evening with mechanical devotion. They come back to
the play from other parts. They see it anew. If it is such a piece
as _The Cherry Orchard_, they plunge into its depths with a sense of
refreshment. They are the parts of a whole which they can never greatly
alter, but which they can enrich by new contributions.
We have, then, in this performance an almost perfect example of minute
and thorough Realism, fused into something beyond Realism through its
union with a play distinctly expressionistic in certain qualities.
It would be easy to see how frank, non-realistic acting could be
applied to _The Cherry Orchard_. It is, in fact, very hard to see
how the players can act some of the speeches as they do, notably the
descriptions of themselves and their lives which the governess and
Madame Ranevsky furnish to fellow-characters fully acquainted with
all they say, characters who very rightly pay not the slightest heed.
If ever a player had an opportunity to bridge directly the gap which
has existed between stage and audience for the past fifty years, and
to present emotion as simply and honestly and theatrically as do the
gravestones in Spoon River, it is the actress who plays the governess.
She begins the second act with the following speech, virtually a
soliloquy, to which none of the others on the stage pay the least
attention, even the attention of boredom:
I have no proper passport. I don’t know how old I am; I always feel I
am still young. When I was a little girl my father and mother used to
go about from one country fair to another, giving performances, and
very good ones, too. I used to do the _salto mortale_ and all sorts of
tricks. When papa and mamma died, an old German lady adopted me and
educated me. Good! When I grew up I became a governess. But where I
come from and who I am I haven’t a notion. Who my parents were—very
likely they weren’t married—I don’t know. I don’t know anything about
it. I long to talk so, and I have no one to talk to, I have no friends
or relations.
Is this Realism? Is it Expressionism? Is it something between, some
Realism of the Spirit opposed to the Realism of Flesh which we know?
Can we say that we know true Realism of the Flesh as yet? Even if we do
know it in a few fugitive productions, are we ready to give up not only
such Realism but also the possibility of deeply moving performances
like this of _The Cherry Orchard_, and to go seeking a fresh and
debatable thing far on the other side of experience? If we are, it is
because, we see that such perfection as this of _The Cherry Orchard_ is
a very rare thing for which we pay with hours of the commonplace, and
because we recognize that when a play reaches such spiritual quality it
has traveled so far from Realism that the journey is almost over.
CHAPTER II
THE LIVING STAGE
There is something in the nature of the theater that makes Realism
a natural and a thoroughly unsatisfactory method of expression. Its
principal material, the actor, is too near actuality. It is no triumph
of art to make a flesh-and-blood man named Grant Mitchell into a
flesh-and-blood man named Andrew Lane. Especially when the heart of the
whole business is an elaborate pretense that there really isn’t any
actor, and there really isn’t any theater, and we are really looking
through the fourth wall of a room in the next village.
Obviously no other art is so close to life or so quick with life’s
vitality. Literature uses printed signs of a very arbitrary and
formal nature, which we translate into words forming ideas and mental
pictures, which, in turn, may suggest human beings and their emotions.
Music employs sounds some of which faintly suggest bird-notes or the
rumble of the heavens, but none of which comes within shouting distance
of the human voice. Painting has pieces of canvas and lumps of colored
clays, and these it arranges in patterns, through which, by custom
and habit, we are able to gain an impression of a curiously flattened
life. Even sculpture, literal as its rounded, three-dimensional shapes
ordinarily are, must use the intermediary of clay or rock. The theater
is the one art that works in the materials of life itself. It employs
life to render life. Painting, architecture, and sculpture may supply a
background to the actor, but the actor is the center of the play, and
when he speaks the words of literature he speaks them as the actual
human being from whom they are supposed to come.
The actor brings the theater far too close to life to please some of
its great lovers. The actuality of the actor affrights them. Gordon
Craig, once an actor and always a true partizan of the theater, has
felt this. He has found the actor too much a piece of life, too much a
creature of the emotions of existence, and too little an impersonal and
dependable tool of the artist. “The actions of the actor’s body, the
expression of his face, the sounds of his voice, all are at the mercy
of the winds of his emotions.” He is not clay, he is not stone, he is
not curves of ink, he is not arbitrary sounds produced from wood or
brass. He is life itself, and a very irregular and undependable part of
life. Therefore, says Craig, the thing that the actor gives us is not a
work of art; “it is a series of accidental confessions.”
Now the contrast between the pliant and well-behaved clay and the
intractable actor is interesting. And there is a certain significance
in the fact that when Craig describes the work of the actor as a series
of “accidental confessions,” he uses a phrase which would delight the
harshest of the realists—the writers who practised Naturalism, the
literal transcription of the irregularities of life. But the issue goes
deeper. The actor is essential to the theater. He cannot be turned out
for a glorified puppet, an _Ubermarionette_. But perhaps he can be
told that he is far too near life and its accidents to spend his time
imitating them. To give us life and its significance the dramatist,
like workers in the other arts, needs an intermediary. If the actor is
not a true intermediary, because he is a part of life, the dramatist
has only to see that he can go beyond the actuality of the physical
actor to Form. With the creative vitality of the living actor to awaken
us and make us sensitive and responsive, the dramatist may strive to
reach beyond outward truth to that inner truth which presents itself to
us in deliberate and natural arrangements of life.
It is no easy thing to tell what is meant by the word Form when we take
it past the idea of the design of things in a literal sense, and apply
it to significance in the design of life. But it is easy to say that
Form has nothing whatever to do with representation or illusion. As
Clive Bell points out in his book _Art_, in which he makes a brilliant
plea for what he calls “significant form” as the test of visual art,
the fact that a thing is representative, does not at all suggest either
the presence or the absence of Form. It does not preclude its having
Form just as it does not in the least assure it. The theater will
always have the physical body of the actor, and to that extent it will
always be representational. But that is certainly all it need have of
illusion. What the actor says and the atmosphere in which he appears
may be absolutely non-representational. Even his physical body, as he
uses it, may take on qualities outside and beyond illusion.
It remains the dramatist’s special business to master the extremely
difficult task of fighting through to Form while retaining the
realistic technique, or else—which seems far better—frankly to desert
Realism, representation, illusion, and write directly in significant
terms, no matter how unplausible they may be. After all, common sense
sees that it is better to concentrate all of an artist’s technical
energies on the major thing he wishes to accomplish. Bell says of
the men and women of the future: “When they think of the early
twentieth-century painters they will think only of the artists who
tried to create Form—the artisans who tried to create illusions will
be forgotten.” It is equally true that the artist who tries to create
illusion is more than likely to forget to create Form.
Now creating Form does not mean hiding the actuality of the actor
under strange robes. There seems to be a curious notion abroad that
the alternative to Realism is Romance. It is true that in trying to
escape out of Realism a number of playwrights have avoided reality
and wandered into the never-never-land of Thalanna and Kongros. It is
also true that modern sciences, history, archeology, and psychology,
have made the past new and real and alive again, and that certain
playwrights have seen in the rejuvenated ages a chance to escape the
realistic and to attain more permanent values. But it is not true that
the present offers smaller opportunities. Expressionist playwrights
have already shown this conclusively enough; witness Eugene O’Neill’s
_The Hairy Ape_.
Theatrical history has never been as popular with theatrical reformers
as it should be. It shows not only that the realistic technique is a
matter of the last half century, and that the greatest periods of the
theater’s history were non-realistic. But it shows also that even when
Realism was an impossible idea, and when expressive, significant Form
was the only thing at which the playwright aimed, the theater and its
audiences usually lived frankly and healthfully in the present.
Greek tragedy, to be sure, was not a thing of the present—except in
the reality of its religious emotion. Its heroes came out of the past.
They did not talk or act like the Athenians that watched them. They
even dressed according to a set convention of their own. In every way
the Greek tragic theater embraced Form, directly and naturally. It was
in the temperament of the Greeks. Their sculpture was realistic to a
degree never before reached and not surpassed in physical truth to-day;
yet from these statues we gain a sense of Form far more significant
than the sense of life which they give us. Representation was not an
end to the Greek artist. The dramatist of Athens felt no desire to
“humanize” his heroes or to make them like the people about him in any
particular. The drama was religious in origin and had not yet grown
temporal. So long as the Greek mind had its fondness for Form, there
could be no demand for the smallest actuality.
But man’s natural fondness for “humanness” and “recognition” found
plenty of opportunity for expression after the passing of the great
Greeks. And it was satisfied in almost every case without breaking in
too sharply on the heart of the drama, expression of Form. The medieval
religious drama was both religious and temporal. The saints were very
much of the times in clothes and in habits. The Bible characters
lived the lives and wore the garments and exercised the minds of
people of the Middle Ages. Shakespeare dipped back into history and
into romance, too, but his Italian nobles dressed like Londoners, his
Roman “mechanicals” were British workmen, and his Athenian yokels
came out of the English countryside. Molière “modernized” the Roman
rascal Phormio into the Neapolitan rascal Scapin, and the ordinary
Parisian gentleman served him for Alceste. Phèdre and Iphigénie were
not so very Greek. In England tragedians played Shakespeare in the
costumes of their own day down through Garrick, Siddons, and Kemble.
And do you imagine that all this had the slightest effect on the
plays, any bearing on their expression of the inner Form rather than
the outward shape of life? In spite of the flesh-and-blood actor,
clothed in the costumes of the time, the playwright was saved from mere
representation, from all this peep-hole business of Realism. Doubtless
he was saved because the temper of his time was not corrupted and
twisted and tortured by the unholy union of science and capitalism.
But it is rather interesting to remember that the actors appeared in
theaters so utterly unreal, so essentially theatrical, that nobody
could imagine for a moment that he was standing with his eye glued to a
chink in the fourth wall.
The theaters of the past united the temporal and the eternal, the
passing moment and the permanent Form partly in innocence, and
partly from a natural ability to understand things better in their
own terms. We, too, can grasp more of the Form of life if we see
it derived from the life we know. But this does not mean that the
Elizabethans had the slightest interest in the thing that has absorbed
our stage—plausibility, representation, resemblance. To-day we are
beginning again to desire reality of soul instead of mere reality of
body. We want to know about our own time and our own people, but we
don’t give a hang to learn how imperfectly, how haltingly, a modern,
realistic Hamlet would express his thoughts on suicide.
It is easy enough to see how much Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy
would have lost if he had written like a Galsworthy. Poetry of word
is not the only thing that would have gone by the board. Poetry of
idea would have disappeared, too. More than that, the ability of a
character to express himself would have been hideously confined within
the formula of plausibility. Perhaps so great an artist could have
written his tragedy without permitting a single person to speak an
inner thought that time and circumstance could not bring out, but I am
a little inclined to doubt it. And I am very much inclined to assert
that the vitality and the effectiveness of such a work of unnatural
and straining effort would have been nothing beside the vitality and
effectiveness of the _Hamlet_ we know.
[Illustration:
George Pitoëff’s arrangement of _He Who Gets Slapped_ in Paris. The
stage is draped in black curtains. Narrow scarlet ribbons looped
from the proscenium arch indicate a circus tent. The actors make
their entrances and exists from behind a huge circus poster, which is
changed from act to act.
]
For twenty years the European stage has struggled over the problem
of plausibility and resemblance in setting. The thing called the new
movement in the theater has spent half the time devising mechanisms
and technique for achieving genuine representation instead of the
bastard thing that tried to make a dining room out of badly painted
and flimsy canvas. And it has spent about half the time trying to
get rid of this machinery and this technique in order to escape the
Realism which demanded such things. In Stockholm you see the touring
company of the Moscow Art Theater playing realistic plays in just the
sort of ugly, cheap, old setting that Craig, Reinhardt and Belasco
equally set their faces against. In Dresden you see Shaw’s _Pygmalion_
played at the State Schauspielhaus in settings as solid and illusive
as stone and wood. In Paris you see the Russian Georges Pitoëff giving
Andreyeff’s _He Who Gets Slapped_ in black curtains with four ribbons
looped up to indicate the form of a circus tent, and Tchehoff’s _The
Seagull_ in settings which go back to the old flapping canvas flats
again, admitting that the theater is a place of pretense, and which
then attempt—not very successfully—to give these flats, in color and
outline, the Form of the play.
Still further along the way from Realism to an expressionist stage,
you find Copeau’s naked stage in Paris that unites frankly with the
auditorium, and changes very little from _The S. S. Tenacity_ to _Les
Frères Karamazov_. Finally in Vienna, you find, in the Redoutensaal
made from the ballroom of Maria Theresa’s palace, a theater without
proscenium, machinery or scenery, a theater where the actor is frankly
the actor. Here you have the culminating expression of the growing
sense in Europe that, because the stage is so close to life in the
presence of the living actor, it need not and it must not attempt to
create the illusion of reality. Through such a conception the theater
is freed once more to seek the Form of life.
CHAPTER III
THE PATH OF THE PLAY
The story of the attempt of the theater to escape from Realism is a
curious story. As a deliberate effort of the playwrights to see life
in the terms of Form instead of accidental actuality it goes back only
half a dozen years through the dramas of the Germans who adopted the
word Expressionism to describe their aim and technique. It has hung
potential for ten or fifteen years in the work of the more advanced and
philosophic designers and directors of the new stagecraft, a waiting
stimulus to the playwrights. As an unconscious impulse to reach beyond
the limits of Realism its beginnings are to be traced back twenty,
thirty, almost forty years in the work of some of Europe’s ablest
realists.
The two greatest figures in the modern theater—which is the realistic
theater—give the same demonstration of the limitations of Realism,
and turn in the same fashion away from actuality and towards an
intense spiritual vitality. Both Ibsen and Strindberg come out of
Romanticism into Realism, and pass on into a Symbolism that is far on
the way towards Expressionism. In Ibsen the new tendency is clearly
marked in _The Wild Duck_ (1884) and develops gradually through _The
Master Builder_ (1892) to completion in _When We Dead Awaken_ (1899).
Strindberg’s _Towards Damascus_ (1898) carries strong hints of the
spiritual intensity which threatened the outer reality of so many of
Strindberg’s earlier plays; and by 1902, in _Swanwhite_ and _The Dream
Play_, he is well embarked on a type of non-realistic drama which finds
a bizarre culmination in _The Spook Sonata_ in 1907.
Two other European playwrights of distinction—Tchehoff and
Wedekind—show a similar dissatisfaction with pure Realism, though
neither passes through the three stages of development to be traced in
Ibsen and Strindberg. The work of Tchehoff and the work of Wedekind
is all pretty much of a piece. It is never wholly realistic in the
narrowest sense. Each has a peculiar quality and method throughout.
Tchehoff, beginning in 1896 with _The Seagull_, keeps to a Realism
of such intense spiritual truth that, in a performance of his _The
Cherry Orchard_ by the Moscow Art Theater such as I have described,
its extraordinary virtues are the virtues of Expressionism. Wedekind’s
first play, the thesis-drama _The Awakening of Spring_, written in
1891, is stamped with his curious and violent intensity, and his sense
of the spiritual overtones of life. In 1895 and 1903 he produced in the
two parts of _Lulu_—_Erdgeist_ and _Pandora’s Box_—dramas horrifically
actual in their pictures of sexual aberration and at the same time so
intense psychologically and so sharply defined and apt in action that
their Realism treads close on the boundaries which Expressionism has
over-passed.
There is a curious distinction in end and means between such plays
as these of Ibsen, Strindberg, Tchehoff, and Wedekind, and the newer
expressionist dramas of Germany and America. The earlier plays
indulge in symbolic, fantastic, deeply spiritual ideas, but their
language is almost always highly realistic. They are still bound to
the past of their authors and to the present of their theater. The
newer expressionist dramas, on the other hand, are as free in speech
as they are in idea. It is a freedom that often makes a harmonious
wedding of end and means. Sometimes, as in plays of _Der Sturm_
group, the language is so completely free from the bonds of actuality
that it approaches the onomatopoetic verse of Mallarmé depending
on sound for its sense. In Eugene O’Neill’s distinguished piece of
Expressionism, _The Hairy Ape_, the playwright strikes a happy medium
with speech which is realistic and characteristic in idiom but which
is developed in idea, intensity and length of utterance clean past
the possibilities of the people of the play. Occasionally you find a
pseudo-expressionist piece like _Vatermord_, by Arnold Bronnen, whose
action is naturalistic—grossly naturalistic—but whose language is
often far from natural. This piece was first produced in Berlin in
the summer of 1922 when the mind of the German capital could safely
be described as neurotic. Its subject matter—the incest and patricide
of the Œdipus complex, with a little adventitious homosexuality, all
circling about a boy in his ’teens—produced a stormy session between
adherents and opponents, a session finally ended by the _Schutzpolizei_
with rifles and the command: “Sei ruhig, meine Herrschaften!” The
run which followed at one of the theaters formerly directed by Max
Reinhardt may be explained by the notorious subject matter, but there
were critics to assert that Bronnen had a style of considerable power
as well as novelty. The boy’s final speech, as he staggers onto the
stage from an inner room, where he has killed his father, and rebuffs
the passionate entreaties of his mother, is translated from the printed
version, retaining the one form of punctuation used, the slanting dash
to indicate the end of a line, though not necessarily of a sentence:
I’m through with you / I’m through with everything / Go bury
your husband you are old / I am young / I don’t know you /
I am free /
Nobody in front of me nobody next to me nobody over me father’s
dead / Heaven I spring up to you I fly / It pounds shakes groans
complains must rise swells wells up springs up flies must rise must
rise
I
I bloom
Before such an arrangement of words _The Spook Sonata_ seems almost
mid-Victorian. The Student speaks to the ghostly Milkmaid in the most
matter of fact fashion. Even the old Mummy, the mad woman who always
sits in a closet, talks like a most realistic parrot when she is not
talking like a most realistic woman. Here it is the ideas that stagger
and affright you, the molding minds, the walking Dead, the cook who
draws all the nourishment out of the food before she serves it, the
terrible relations of young and old; all of them are things having
faint patterns in actuality and raised by Strindberg to a horrible
clarity.
To follow the banner of Expressionism in playwriting—I say nothing of
stage setting, for that is, happily, another matter—requires all three
Graces and a strong stomach. The bizarre morbidity, the nauseating
sexuality, the lack of any trace of joy or beauty, which characterize
the work of most of those who labeled themselves expressionists in
Germany during the past few years, match Strindberg at his unhappiest,
while the vigor with which they drive their ideas forth in speech
far outdoes him. Expressionism, in the narrow sense in which such
plays define it, is a violent storm of emotion beating up from the
unconscious mind. It is no more than the waves which shatter themselves
on the shore of our conscious existence, only a distorted hint of the
deep and mysterious sea of the unconscious. Expressionism, as we have
so far known it, is a meeting of the fringes of the conscious and the
unconscious, and the meeting is startling indeed.
Germany’s reception of the expressionist plays was open-minded, as is
Germany’s reception of almost all new effort. The dramas of the best of
the expressionists—Georg Kaiser and Walter Hasenclever—were produced in
leading theaters, on the official stages of Dresden and of Frankfort,
and in Reinhardt’s playhouses, for example. But by the summer of
1922 they had disappeared from the very catholic and long-suffering
repertories of these houses, and while Wedekind and Strindberg were
produced from Stockholm to Vienna, the simon-pure expressionists,
the playwrights of what I think it is fair to call the lesser
Expressionism, were hardly to be seen. Only the one-act opera, _Mörder,
Hoffnung der Frauen_, a composition by Paul Hindemith on a playlet by
the artist-author, Oskar Kokoschka, was being played.
This piece, produced at the City Opera House in Frankfort, points
an interesting union and parallel between at least one sort of
Expressionism and music. The action, passing in some indefinite olden
time, is symbolically very difficult—quite as difficult as its title,
_Murderer, Hope of Women_. The emotion of the scenes, on the other
hand, is clear enough, and it receives from the music a background of
color, a tonal reinforcement, that is most welcome; at the same time
the composer finds in the vigorous and intense, if somewhat arbitrary,
feeling of the playwright a provocative challenge.
[Illustration:
A setting by Ludwig Sievert for _Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen_, an
expressionistic opera by Kokoschka. Ramps lead from the center of the
stage to raised platforms right and left. Dark walls rise at the back,
broken by triangular entrances at either side and by a grilled doorway
in the center, flanked by tall triangular pylons of red-orange.
]
Kokoschka himself designed a setting for _Mörder, Hoffnung der
Frauen_ when it was first produced at the Albert Theater in Dresden
as a play. A photograph of the production betrays an uneasy setting,
hardly stage-worthy in arrangement and composition, and rather badly
executed. The pages of _Die Neue Schaubühne_ have shown several
other expressionist stage designs as unsatisfactory, but in the more
widely known productions these pieces have been lucky enough to fall
into the hands of first-rate men like Adolf Linnebach of Dresden and
Ludwig Sievert of Frankfort. Sketches made from Linnebach’s production
of Hasenclever’s _Jenseits_ in Dresden show a simple and effective
use of light and shadow and of little else, with certain necessary
elements of design projected by a sort of magic-lantern technique upon
the background of dome or curtain. In actual performance Sievert’s
setting for the Kokoschka opera is strong and arresting with dark
surfaces massed in triangles symbolic of the feminine element dominant
in the piece, and with a successful, if not very subtle, use of red
and red-orange on the pylon surfaces guarding the prison door. The
direction of the singers and chorus, under the hand of Dr. Ernst Lert,
is a thoroughly expressive part of music and setting.
Though the most celebrated plays of the expressionist pioneers have
failed to make a place for themselves in the German repertory, they
have had their effect. Playwrights who might have written in the
conventional mode have been turned towards a freer technique, and
they have succeeded in accomplishing interesting and promising things.
The most notable of the plays thus produced, _Masse-Mensch_, deserves
a chapter to itself. I shall write here of two lesser works by Karel
Capek, one seen in the Czech National Theater, where it was first
produced, the other read in a German translation.
In the first, _The Insect Comedy_, Karel Capek’s brother, a scenic
artist, has a share as collaborator. It is a fantastic and picturesque
piece of satire providing excellent opportunities for the newer methods
in production. It is a comment on post-war conditions as symbolized
in the life of butterflies, beetles, and ants. The prolog finds a
young man wandering in the woods, and puts him comfortably to sleep
on a grassy bank after a little talk with an absurdly pedantical
entomologist. He sleeps through the three succeeding acts surrounded
and occasionally disturbed by figures of insects grown life-size. The
first act passes with the brilliant butterflies, who stand for the
heedless, unproductive men and women of the social and pseudo-artistic
worlds with time for only chatter and flirtation while disaster rumbles
beneath them. In the production of this scene, the _régisseur_, K. H.
Hilar, keeps the players moving ceaselessly, their hands and heads
lightly undulating, with the restlessness of the antennæed world, while
high around the back of the scene various of the brightly costumed
insects constantly dance behind the translucent curtain of the woods.
In the second scene the humble grubs crawl in and out of their burrows
on busy errands of accumulation. These are the assiduous profiteers and
misers of war-time society. The act ends in a broad touch of comedy.
A beetle has been murdering passing insects and dragging their bodies
down below for his wife to hoard. There enters The Parasite, a tramp
bug. He does not work. Why should he? He has only to wait for the
busy capitalists of his world to fill their larders. Then, when the
time comes, he will rise—or more accurately descend—and the wealth of
the world will be his. He ducks into the beetle’s hole, and in a few
moments he comes up, a swollen and jovial Communist, dancing in glee.
The ever-present prompter’s box serves conveniently for one of the
holes, and the background of green and black woods is projected instead
of painted; otherwise there is little of interest in the staging of
this scene.
The third act carries us to the ants. Here are the eternal laborers,
tramping in an endless circle upon their work, under the eye of
superiors very like officers and to a rhythm beaten out by a more
privileged one of their own number. The Capeks costume the army of
ants in khaki, puttees and all, and provide a desolate hill for a
background. It might be blasted by either war or commerce. Into its
surface descend shafts that might lead to either mines or dugouts.
A glowering background of crazy chimneys and telegraph poles and
smoke—all projected on the cyclorama—completes the picture. Presently
there come shouting and a courier. More couriers. War threatens. The
ants drop their burdens for rifles and continue their march. The
officer-ants assume a higher station and even loftier phrases of
command; from the back they philosophize and give orders in good old
Kaiser-fashion. The act culminates with a conflict and the lordship of
a new race of ants.
The epilog is divided between the appearance from her chrysalis of
an ephemera of whom the sleeping man has been dimly and hopefully
conscious in the last two scenes, her death after a dance with other
short-lived mayflies, and the despairing end of the human visitor. This
end is commented upon in a half satiric and half aspiring vein through
the introduction of a group of wanderers who come upon the dead body,
gaze at it in astonishment and sadness for a moment, and then pass on,
singing, upon the ever-creative way of the peasant.
_R. U. R._, Karel Capek’s other play (in German, _W. U. R._) is a tale
of a Frankenstein such as H. G. Wells might have written in his earlier
days. It seems both gruesomely effective and at times philosophic. The
letters “R. U. R.” are an abbreviation of the name of a firm engaged in
manufacturing “_Roboters_,” or workmen stamped out and given life by a
machine. After a not very skilful exposition of the nature of this new
device for lightening the world’s work, the play passes on to show the
degenerating effect upon mankind of ceasing to labor. The “_Roboters_”
are given pain in order to remind them not to be careless and break
their legs and arms. Thereupon they acquire something not unlike a
soul. Presently comes a consciousness of their station and their power.
They rise and kill all mankind—except one man. Later they find to
their dismay that the secret formula of the materials from which they
were stamped out has been destroyed. They wear out in twenty years.
And there will be an end. The last act shows their frantic appeal for
a way to perpetuate themselves. The one man finds it at last when he
recognizes love awakening in a male and a female “_Roboter_.” The
process of mankind will begin once more. Rather the sort of end that
Anatole France would have put to the story—Frankenstein turned man.
None of this, of course—either Kaiser or Capek—is Expressionism very
far on its way. Some of it is trivial. Some is interesting enough.
Much is decadent or uncertain. But it is not difficult to believe
that there is something of the future in it. It is a sign. There is a
starlike gleam in even the worst of the mire. Vitality, though often a
morbid vitality, animates it. When we see Eugene O’Neill saying Nay to
Realism in the same fashion, and turning out so strong and significant
a play as _The Hairy Ape_—a play that grows greater in the perspective
of Europe—it is not very difficult to hope and to look forward.
In the artists who give Expressionism a physical form and a pictorial
atmosphere upon the stage we find still more of hope. They have gone
more quickly and more securely towards their goal. They have had a
disciplinary practice upon the plays of an earlier time, a time before
Realism. They are freed from the moral problems of the writer; and
where their work is distempered with the morbidity, the unhealthiness,
of so much of our time, the result is less obvious in color or design
than it would be if it took the form of words. And they have had
behind them the history and the example of the movement in art which
we once called Post-Impressionism, but which follows logically into
Expressionism, the movement of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso,
Duchamp.
The problem for the expressionist play is the problem of music. And
yet not its problem; for music, being so markedly apart from actuality
in its materials, has made few and not very successful attempts at
the Realism which has swamped our stage. Music has been by very
nature expressionistic. It has failed whenever, as program music, it
approached the suggestion of the actual. For the rest, it has soared,
soared easily, surely, towards direct expression of spiritual reality.
Expressionism in the theater has to seek the way of music, the way
towards beauty and ecstasy. The difficulty of the playwright is that
he must always feel the pull of the actual life about him; he must
make his drama out of human beings and not out of pure vision or pure
emotional response. The world about him is corrupt and corrupting
outwardly, as well as beautiful and wonderful within. He cannot, like
the musician, leap away from its entanglements by putting his hands to
an instrument of abstract art. But he can gain a certain release by
forswearing as much as possible the reproduction of the actual.
CHAPTER IV
BLACK CURTAINS
To-day we are thinking more and more of the future of the theater, the
future of the play and the playwright, the future of production, of
direction and the actor.
If we are to think of the future to any effect, we must think of the
past as well as the present. The path of to-morrow strikes off from the
maze of to-day. To guess at its direction with much chance of success,
we must look now and then at the map of the settled roads of yesterday.
If we want to estimate the chances of the non-realistic play to
advance beyond its expressionist beginnings in Germany, we must try to
understand the present state of the art of theatrical production, and
the past of play and players, the theater and its stagecraft. A share
of the future—a very large share, I believe—may lie with America; but
the past is Continental. And a surprising amount of the past is German.
The past of the play shows one interesting peculiarity. The great
plays of the romantic movement were developed where there were great
theaters, in France and in Germany. Quite otherwise with Realism. Its
greatest works—the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg—were created in small
countries almost outside the consciousness of the nineteenth century
theater. This was natural enough. Realistic plays were, in the last
analysis, lonely literary rationalizations. They were not theatrical.
They did not spring out of the theater. Instead they altered the
theater to suit their needs. The theater that they altered most was the
German theater, and there the dramas of the Scandinavians found their
best audience.
But the German theater, being a healthy theater, could not stop at
the point where it became an almost perfect mechanism for presenting
these plays. Its directors and its artists went on experimenting. They
had old plays to mount, also, plays out of the romantic and classic
periods. They put their brains and their machines at work upon these
pieces, as well as upon the realistic, and soon they had developed
methods of production for non-realistic plays quite as admirable for
the purpose as any of their tricks for lifting the fourth wall before
our very eyes. The German theatrical organization became more and
more restive under the realistic plays and the old “classics.” It was
preparing for something new. The _Zeitgeist_ was working. Soon it began
to work upon the playwrights. There came abortive beginnings in the
expressionist plays I have written about in the last chapter. And the
German theater went on—and goes on—experimenting.
Let us look at this theater a little more closely. For it is the
Continental theater to-day as it was yesterday; France has only
Copeau, England experiments in little theaters as America experimented
ten years ago. And where the Continental theater is, there we are
very likely indeed to find the Continental play of the future. The
expressionist drama, like every school of drama except the realistic,
is a product of the theater in form and vitality, quite as much as it
is a product of society in its mind and materials.
The story of the artistic development of the German theater past the
realistic stage is familiar enough. It began in 1905, it was fairly
complete by 1914. It was founded upon Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia,
and it is symbolized in the name of Max Reinhardt. It made Realism
still for Ibsen and Strindberg; but it plowed past the Realism of
Otto Brahm—which is the Realism of Belasco—and it achieved a pregnant
actuality so direct and simple that it soon gave birth to a new
imagination.
The new methods of production are fairly easy to grasp. They rest
on a few general principles. The pretenses of the theater had to be
successful pretenses. To begin with, certain tricks of the old theater
were forsworn, tricks in the main that failed to succeed. Such an
obvious pretense as painted perspective had to go. Footlights had to
be curbed; for the illumination must be both more natural and more
beautiful. But, beyond these negative things, the directors sought to
achieve positive effects for which they had to call into the theater
artists of first-rate ability. The business of these artists, whether
working on a realistic play or an imaginative one, was to evoke the
atmosphere of the piece in setting and in lights. They fell back on
three general principles to aid their sense of line and color in
visually dramatizing the action. In the first place they simplified
the stage picture. They subordinated or eliminated detail. They put as
little as possible on the stage that might distract the spectator from
the meaning of the general design (which was the meaning of the play),
or from the actions and speeches of the characters. Then, by an adroit
use of simple materials and forms, they enriched the setting—along the
lines of the play—through suggestion. One detail suggested the nature
of the whole. The base of a huge column made the audience visualize
for itself the size of the building. Half an arch springing off into
darkness created the impression of a great vaulted structure. Finally
came a synthesis of all the available and appropriate forces of the
theater, and of all the qualities of the play; this implying for the
director the establishment of a certain apt rhythm in the performance.
This pictorial reform, backed by such direction and acting as the
German theater alone was able to supply, and utilizing all manner of
mechanical devices for scene-shifting and lighting, has stood to us
for some ten years as the so-called new movement in the theater. It
has been familiar through the names of Craig and Appia as pioneer
theorists, of Reinhardt, and of artists like Ernst Stern and Alfred
Roller; through an occasional production from abroad, like Reinhardt’s
_Sumurûn_; and, at last, through the exceptional work of our own
artists in America and the men—from Arthur Hopkins to directors of
little theaters—who have given them their opportunities or amplified
their conceptions.
Fringing the outside of all this in the past have been bastard
minglings of old technique and new spirit, such as Bakst and the
Ballets Russes displayed, and the beginnings of theory and experiment
leading towards a new—or a very old—sort of theater, a theater cut off
from the whole peep-hole convention of the proscenium and the fourth
wall.
[Illustration:
The Palace: a setting by Hans Strohbach for _Der Traum, ein Leben_,
a fantasy by Calderon. Columns of dull gold, painted to suggest a
spiral shape, are spaced against a black curtain, which is later drawn
aside to reveal a blood-red sky. In the foreground a group of plotting
Orientals.
]
The strength of this movement in Germany lay partly in a very few
talented directors like Reinhardt and artists like Stern, but very
greatly in the vigorous and healthy organization of the German theater.
Because of the division of Germany in small kingdoms and duchies,
there had always been many centers of artistic life, each about a
court in the capital. In a score of cities, enriched by industrial
development, there were theaters endowed by the state or the city, and
directed towards the highest artistic accomplishment. In the larger
cities privately owned theaters followed the lead of the public
institutions. The strength of these houses lay in their endowment,
their ideals, and their system of organization. This was the repertory
system. Here, as nowhere in England or America and only here or there
in France, were theaters directed by a single mind, employing a
permanent company of players, maintaining a repertory of plays, old
and new, given in recurring succession night after night, theaters
retaining therefore a permanent audience, dependable both in pocketbook
and in taste. Supplementing these theaters were organizations of
playgoers among the middle and lower classes, such as the Freie
Volksbühne in Berlin, which widened the audience of subscribers to good
work in the theater. Between endowment and the security of a permanent
audience, it was possible for these German theaters to give uncommonly
fine performances at uncommonly low prices.
Along with the development of new methods in production went a good
deal of activity in theater building. In practice, as well as in
theory, Max Littmann and Oskar Kaufmann, following Schinkel and
Semper, who had worked with Goethe and Wagner, did much to improve
the auditoriums of German theaters. The result is not so marked as
in the case of the scenic artists. Most of the theaters are old
indeed and awkwardly shaped, and too many of the new ones continue
the tradition of a parquet surrounded and surmounted by three or four
shallow, horseshoe-shaped balconies. These balconies are not so good
to see or hear from as our own. A realization of the awkwardness of
these shelves or _Rangen_, as they are termed in German, produced an
opposition, headed by Littmann, that called for their elimination and
for the substitution of an amphitheater type of house with no balconies
and with a steeper floor to allow of better sight-lines. The fight
of _Ring vs. Rang_ has resulted in several auditoriums designed by
Littmann, the Prinzregenten Theater and the Künstler, for example, in
Munich, the slant of whose floors is far too sharp; from the upper
rows, the players are seen as in some far-off pit. The slant is
greater than necessary, and absolutely straight; the practice of the
American architect, H. C. Ingalls, of grading the floor in a gradually
increasing curve, produces a far better effect. A compromise between
_Rang_ and _Ring_ might be found in a development of the American house
with only one balcony; a more steeply slanting floor than we ordinarily
have would thus bring two amphitheaters or _Rings_ into a single
auditorium. Germany possesses, however, some admirable playhouses in
the Kammerspielhaus formerly directed by Reinhardt in Berlin, in the
Volksbühne designed by Oskar Kaufmann, and in many features of the
Künstler Theater. The seating arrangements have formed one of the best
features of the German houses. The chairs are almost always too thinly
padded; but the elimination of aisles more than compensates. The whole
audience is united in a single responsive body. And because each row
is a little wider than ours and the side walls of the auditoriums are
liberally supplied with doors, the audience empties out more quickly
than ours and in an orderly manner that puts American fire-regulations
to shame. I have seen the three thousand spectators of the Volksbühne
walk out in a single minute. It takes from three to four for a small
theater in New York, seating only six hundred, to clear itself.
A factor that has done a great deal for the progress of the German
theater and the reputation of the new stagecraft, is the liberal
attitude of the German periodicals and publishing houses towards new
things in the theater. Editors and writers have been so eager to
present to the public every smallest reform in setting or theater
that the world has gained rather an optimistic view of the extent of
production progress in Germany. Just as it is a fact that only in a
few theaters will you find model auditoriums in Central Europe, in a
similar way you discover that the outstanding work of design before the
war was done by two men, Stern and Roller, and that the other men whose
names decorate the records of the new stagecraft were each responsible
for only a few productions.
One thing further you may learn about the past of the German movement,
even in an investigation so late as the summer of 1922. And that is
that the color in a great majority of the stage settings has been very
far from good. The German has an ear, a very marvelous ear; only the
Russian can approach him in music, and it is not a near approach. But
his eye is bad. Germany has produced no first-rate artists except
Dürer, Schongauer and perhaps Cranach, and Dürer and Schongauer are
celebrated as etchers rather than as painters. That should have been
caution enough for those of us who had to study the German stage at the
distance of the half-tone. The fact of the matter is that the German
is a splendid theorist, a man of large conceptions, and that therefore
in the theater he has been able to design settings of simple and
excellent proportions, which create a good effect in black-and-white.
It is his sense of color that is at fault. Stern, with the mixture of
the Oriental in his blood which did so much for Bakst, and some of
the artists from Vienna and the South brought something to the stage
besides dramatic imagination and sense of proportion. The test of color
downs the rest.
When we think of the future of the German theater we must naturally
think of the present also, and it is a black present. Germany has been
shattered spiritually as well as economically. It has fallen from
dreams of world-dominion to bankruptcy and enslavement. The effect of
this upon the mind of the citizen who has come through four years of
danger and privation, is staggering. One incident of the fall, which
you learn upon visiting Germany, is sharply significant. Until the
soldiers from the broken German armies began to stream back into the
Rhine provinces in November, 1918, the men and women behind the front
believed that their forces were victorious. It is possible for the
theater to go on physically under almost any conditions of privation;
but you must reckon spiritually with an extraordinary state of the
public mind when you prophesy the future of the German theater. Two
things, perhaps, make optimism possible. One: Germany and the German
people have gone through terrible things before; there was the Thirty
Years War. Two: Germany still has the wonderfully trained audience
of pre-war days; it was a broad democratic audience, and no shift in
economic circumstances can destroy so large a part of the cultured
playgoers as war-poverty has done in England, in France, and even to
some extent in America.
War—backed by the movies—has done its worst in the Berlin theater. Here
we find another example of the exchange of ideals and personalities
which has often been noted between victor and vanquished. Just as
America has been Prussianized in its attitude towards the foreigner and
the liberal or radical minority, Berlin has adopted many of the most
evil features of the American theatrical system. Within three years
of the close of hostilities Berlin was being rapidly Broadway-ized.
Repertory was practically dead at all but three or four theaters.
Facing economic difficulties and the competition of the movies for the
services of the actors, Berlin found it was a large enough city to
support long runs for exceptionally great or exceptionally mediocre
plays. Even the three theaters that Reinhardt formerly directed
broke from repertory, and where they had once shown ten or a dozen
productions in two weeks, they showed only three or (counting Sunday
matinees of some old favorites) four. Outside Berlin, repertory
continues in the State and City theaters and even in private ventures;
but many artistic playhouses are badly crippled by the economic
troubles of the nation, and some are forced to close down.
There are certain good signs. The theaters were full in 1922. In
fifty or sixty visits to the theater it was only at musical comedies
that I saw more than one row of vacant seats; in all but half a dozen
cases every seat was sold and occupied. The prices were not high. In
Frankfort, an average city of the larger size, the highest prices
ranged from sixty marks (at that time twenty cents) to one hundred and
twenty marks, depending on the expensiveness or the popularity of the
production; while the lowest prices for seats were twenty marks to
seventy marks, with standing room at six marks.
At such prices even full houses do not make budgets easy to balance.
The theater of post-war Germany must be economical in its expenditures.
That is not, however, such an artistic hardship as much of the talk of
elaborate machinery and handsome productions in pre-war days might
suggest. Rigorous physical simplicity and a reliance on the genius
of design instead of elaboration of mechanics are the vital needs in
stage setting to-day. Germany has done fine things in the simplifying
of production, and it has done them in spite of the temptations of
bulging pocketbooks. What it may be forced to do now through poverty is
a matter for real hope.
The danger—for there is a danger—is that smaller minds may find an
excuse for a mean sort of simplicity, a bareness and barrenness of
spirit. There has always been a tendency among the modern directors and
designers to economize spiritually as well as economically. The results
have been seen in some of our dry, meager “little theater” productions,
full of bare formalism—a sort of “simplism” that has no place in
any art, let alone in the live, varied, rich, and vigorous theater.
Occasionally a German artist of real talent falls into this thin
manner; Ludwig Sievert has mounted _Towards Damascus_ at the Frankfort
Schauspielhaus upon a scheme which is physically interesting, but he
has given his settings a mean, arid, spiritually poverty-stricken
appearance which is never beautiful, and does not express in the least
the intense quality of Strindberg’s play.
The movies break up ensemble in Germany, and bear down on repertory.
They offer salaries that the actor, impoverished quite as much as the
worker, cannot resist. Moreover they demand from him the daylight
hours which must be given to rehearsals of old and new pieces if
repertory is to exist. The German actor cannot appear in a repertory
theater in the evenings, as our actor can appear upon Broadway, and put
in his days in front of the camera, as ours often does. But—and this
is highly important—the German actor has been trained in a school of
ideals and self-expression which makes him demand more than the movies
can give him. He must have some sort of serious work in the theater,
and he is finding it more and more in special summer engagements or
_Festspiele_. Thus many of the greatest of the nation’s players are
often assembled at salaries which, by comparison with their motion
picture earnings, are hardly salaries at all.
There remains the spirit of the German people. The audiences are
intact and intelligent, but what about their spirit? Can these people
live down their sufferings or lift them up to something great outside
themselves? The prospect is not so dark in the southern parts, in
Bavaria, perhaps; it is certainly bright in Austria, where hunger and
economic misery are the realest and where the divinity of the human
spirit is asserted again and again in every happy gesture of this
lovely people. In Berlin it is another matter. Spiritual dejection
and gnawing misery are in the face of every one. They are to be seen
on the stage, too. Berlin does not go to the theater to be taken out
of itself; it seems to neglect the prime use of art. Berlin demands
an echoing misery from its playhouses. It goes to see a blacker and
more despicable _Richard III_ than Shakespeare ever imagined. It
suffers the torments of disillusioned revolution in _Masse-Mensch_
at the working people’s theater. It throngs the glowering caverns of
the Grosses Schauspielhaus. And everywhere the stage is hung in black
curtains. “Warum immer die schwarzen Vorhänge?” we ask again and again.
Perhaps they are only an accident of the attempt to get a background of
emptiness; but they become a yawning gulf of spiritual blackness. The
only colors to break the pall are the red of blood, and the blue that
strikes across the black a symbol of a sinister cruelty.
Of course, black curtains are no Teuton monopoly. When the Russian
Pitoëff uses them in Paris, when we see them on Broadway and in our
“little theaters,” we do not look for the words “Made in Germany” on
the selvage. But in Germany they seem numerous and more significant.
If the curtains were sometimes dappled with gray or if they were
opalescent with hidden lights, they might be significant of nothing
more than the Germans’ immensely active experiments with a formal
stage. Perhaps _bunte Vorhänge_ are coming. Perhaps it is always a
little dark before dawn.
CHAPTER V
THE TWILIGHT OF THE MACHINES
There are many things upon the German stage besides black dawn. The
twilight of the machines, for instance, and all the past of the new
stagecraft lagging superfluous.
Even the past of the old stagecraft. In the same theater in Frankfort
where one of the three significant pairs of German directors and
artists labors, I have seen _Peer Gynt_ given as incompetently as
any patron of an American small-town stock company could demand. The
settings were hideous; the same badly painted backdrop served for two
or three scenes in different localities; the revolving stage rumbled
noisily and did nothing to shorten intermissions. While the orchestra
played Grieg’s introductory music in the wings and the stage was dark,
waiting actors, who imagined that thereby ears as well as eyes were
dimmed, restlessly shifted from one foot to another in squeaky shoes.
At the beginning of each scene the lights came up like thunder. Through
as many scenes as could be endured, the same players who gave a sharp,
almost electric performance of _Maria Stuart_ the next night, acted
_Peer Gynt_ dully and sloppily to a running fire of assistance
from the prompter’s box. It is worth remarking, incidentally, that
the _souffleur_, as he is euphemistically called, is no necessity in
the repertory theater. He may give a complete and studied reading of
the text one lap ahead of the actors in the Grosses Schauspielhaus,
the Frankfort Schauspielhaus, the Burgtheater in Vienna, the Lessing
Theater in Berlin, and a dozen other first-class theaters; but you
don’t hear his voice in the State Schauspielhaus of Berlin under
Jessner, in Copeau’s Vieux-Colombier in Paris, or during a performance
of _Masse-Mensch_ at the Volksbühne.
[Illustration:
The sleep-walking scene from _Macbeth_ as produced by Harald André at
the Royal Opera in Stockholm. Moonlight slants down through four tall
windows making alternate bars of light and shadow, through which moves
the white-robed figure of Lady Macbeth. The Doctor and the Gentlewoman
are half-hidden at one side in the darkness of the foreground.
]
The past of the German stage is seldom slovenly, but it is often
disturbing. To see in 1922 a setting by Roller for _Die Meistersinger_
is like encountering at a fashionable New York _thé dansant_ the girl
you used to take to high school dances in St. Louis in 1907. The German
stage is full of such disquieting reminders of juvenile infatuations;
Sweden is not exempt. The work of the pioneers and imitations of the
work of the pioneers are still to be seen. Verdi’s _Macbeth à la_ Craig
at the Stockholm Opera; _The Sunken Bell_ at the Grosses Schauspielhaus
with Stern’s hill from _Penthesilea_; Reinhardt effects in _Maria
Stuart_ in Frankfort; good old Russian painting in faked perspective in
_Florian Geyer_ in Munich; a wedding of Heinrich Leffler and Maxfield
Parrish at Dresden in the Verdi opera which the Germans so cheerfully
translate as _Der Troubadour_; the style, if you can call it that,
of the Washington Square Players in _Towards Damascus_ in Frankfort.
Everywhere traces of Reinhardt and Craig and Roller.
Roller, alone of the artists who were new fifteen years ago, is still
busy in the theater. The mood he arouses is mixed. It is thoroughly
annoying to find him so unable to grasp the problem of setting in
the remarkable new theater in the Redoutensaal in Vienna, unable to
see that the Gobelins and the crystal, the golden moldings and the
rich baroque ornament of that marvelous room which is both stage and
auditorium, must set the style and color of the screens and formal set
pieces of the stage. It is a little sad to see Roller trying in _Kain_
at the Burgtheater to adopt the steps and black curtains and the one
or two plastics of the newer and younger men. When he is decking out
some war-horse like _Die Meistersinger_ in the good old style of the
revolutionists of 1910, you have to forgive him much, even while you
wonder at the limitations of so many of the stage designers outside
Russia. Take the first scene, for example. Dramatically the thing is
right in proportion and arrangement. It is an interesting composition
of wall spaces and doors, which becomes all the more interesting when
the director has arranged the many costumed characters in waves that
ripple along the shore of the picture and roll up here and there about
some promontory of the design. But when you look away from composition
to color, you see a lack. It is not the difficulty of bad color,
which besets most of the Germans; Roller and Stern generally escape
that. The fact of the matter is that there simply isn’t any color—in
spite of a furnace of dulled orange smoldering on the walls, and some
gray-greens damping it down for contrast. This is not color in the
sense that the Russians know it. Roller does not think in color as does
Nicolas Roerich. What Westerner does—or ever has? Roller thinks in line
and mass and proportion. Then he goes to his paint-box, and selects two
nicely contrasting tones, more or less appropriate to a large medieval
building. He never bothers his head over the dramatic problem of
whether they mean anything in relation to the action, or the artistic
problem of whether he has made one of those subtle arrangements of many
curiously harmonizing colors, which, in the alchemy of the eye, take on
a psychic significance.
[Illustration:
A setting by Alfred Roller for the first act of _Die Meistersinger_ at
the State Opera in Vienna. An example of the purely decorative setting
at its best.
]
Such laggard things—the relics of Craig-ideas and the work of various
of the elder directors and artists—play a more or less normal part in
the life of the German stage. They would find a parallel in any age.
They know their place and keep to it. Something that is only just
beginning to learn its proper and subordinate part in the advance of
the theater is the far-famed stage machinery of Germany.
It was the most natural thing in the world that the Germans should
turn their stage into a machine shop. When they build one of their
great five-story office buildings they begin by laying a railroad
along two sides on the street level and another up in the air above it,
and putting in a traveling elevator, dump-cart, and crane that runs
along on the tracks; after they have this gigantic apparatus in order,
building the building is mere child’s play. _Der verrückte Krieg_ was
all that prevented the development of a most ingenious mechanism for
erecting the erector that builds the building.
The German stage machine is a Frankenstein stage-hand. It is intended
to do the work of scene shifting at great economy of effort and time.
Actually the German theaters seem to employ more stage hands than the
American theaters, and the waits are no shorter on the whole than those
we are able to manage if we want to.
There are two main divisions to the species. Lewis Carroll, listing the
different varieties of Snarks, supplied a formula. There are those, it
is said, that are round and revolve, and those that have rollers and
slide. The revolving stage—made famous by the cohorts of Reinhardt—and
the sliding stage—which includes a sinking variety.
The revolving stage has its furious adherents. They include Reinhardt,
Stern, who utilized its shortcomings quite as marvelously as its good
points in his productions for Reinhardt, and the host of Reinhardt
disciples. It came from Japan in 1896 through Lautenschläger of Munich.
It is a great circle cut out of the stage floor and mounted on wheels
so that it may be freely turned by hand or power. The circle is from
forty to sixty feet across, and usually occupies the greater part of
the stage space. On it the different settings are placed back to back,
anywhere from two to ten fitting snugly together. One after another of
these settings is presented in the opening of the proscenium as the
stage revolves. It retains its reputation because it is the simplest
and handiest scene-shifting machine to use with the great solid plaster
dome which Reinhardt and so many other directors found essential as a
substitute for the flapping and wrinkling canvas sky.
The sliding stage pure and simple is just a couple of low platforms
the size of that part of the stage usually acted on. These carry the
settings and slide out sideways into the wings. While one platform
is in front of the proscenium with the actors giving the play in its
setting, the other is being reset at the right or the left. It is easy
to see that these platforms cannot slide past either end of the plaster
dome if it is far enough down front to be of any use. The Deutsches
Opernhaus in Charlottenburg, Berlin, gets around this by having the
whole gigantic dome slide, too; hung from tracks and carrying its
lights with it, the dome is pushed back into the depths of the stage
when the platforms at the front have to slide. The amusing feature is
that the present director of the theater has so little notion of what
it is all for that in _Don Giovanni_ he makes a number of changes by
rigging his flats and drops on lines, as we might do, and hoisting
them into the flies in full view of the audience on what is by a polite
fiction called a dark stage.
All this whirling of palaces and scuttling of skies is child’s play
beside the sinking stage. As developed by Adolf Linnebach, technical
director of the State Schauspielhaus in Dresden, it almost defies
understanding or description. The simplest variety is to be found
across the National Gallery and the Theaterplatz under the guiding and
inventive hand of Max Hasait of the State Opera House, Linnebach’s
great mechanical rival. The stage of the Opera is divided into seven
sections from the proscenium opening to the spot a hundred feet back
where the _Hinterbühne_ or auxiliary rear-stage begins. These seven
sections can rise some feet above the stage level or sink into the
basement. While the front sections are in the basement, carrying a
setting that has already been used, the rear sections, with another
setting on them, can, by a complicated arrangement, be rolled down
on tracks to take the place of the front sections in the proscenium
opening. While the front sections are in the basement the setting
upon them is changed; the same thing happens to the rear sections
when they are rolled back again. The stage of the Schauspielhaus is
far more complicated. It is divided in only three sections, but when
the two forward sections are in the basement, sliding stages of the
ordinary sort, which rest upon them, can be slid out to the sides
for changes of scene. On these sliding stages small “wagon stages” or
mechanical stage hands operate, carrying large pieces such as stairs
and mantels into place. Under the orchestra pit at the front is another
contrivance, like a small stage on stilts, which can be trundled onto
the first sinking stage straddling the setting. Thus two stages are
super-imposed, and a sort of elevator stage produced, such as Steele
MacKaye once invented. Hasait is nursing a scheme for rearranging his
sinking and sliding stages so that the seven stages may run forward,
sink to the basement, slide back, rise, and run forward again in rapid
succession like an endless chain. The prospect is distinctly startling.
Opponents of the new stagecraft have often claimed that the scenery
ignores the actor. With the sliding and sinking stage a little further
advanced, you can imagine the scenery taking a really furious interest
in the actor, pursuing him from floor to basement and back again. You
can imagine some new director working out a drama in which a cathedral
chases an apostate priest about the stage, or a phallic column pursues
the heroine into the darkness of the cellar only to lose her as she
rises triumphantly on the last of the seven mystic stages guided
and blessed by that unique functionary of the German theater, the
_Obermaschineninspektor_.
[Illustration:
_Der Schatzgräber_: the cottage of the epilogue in Schrecker’s opera.
An extreme conventionalization of the old scenic materials. The
artist, Emil Pirchan, has indicated a cottage by the shape of the
opening in the flat drop. Here, design replaces machinery in securing
a quick change of scene.
]
There are peculiar disadvantages to these expensive mechanisms. The
revolving stage simply can’t handle certain scenes without ceasing
to be a revolving stage. It is impossible to use the entire width
or depth of the stage for an exterior without shoving all the other
scenes off the “revolver,” and giving up its use. All exterior scenes
on the revolving stage have to go up over the rooms set at the back.
The western prairies and the North German sea coast are equally
unpopular with the friends of the revolving stage. The exceptionally
fine production of _Masse-Mensch_—with its various great steps the
whole width and half the height of the stage, alternating with flat
open scenes—received almost no assistance from the “revolver” at the
Volksbühne in Berlin. The technical director, putting this stage
through its paces and exhibiting such amusing tricks as its ability to
rise or sink some six feet at either end, thus producing a slanting
floor, confessed that he much preferred some other type of stage.
The sliding and sinking stage has fewer disadvantages; but it is an
elaborate, expensive, and cumbersome machine to do the work that
designers and stage hands might quite as well accomplish. On the matter
of expense, it is disquieting to hear at a scene-rehearsal of _Das
Rheingold_ that one hundred and fifty men, including electricians, are
busy with this labor-saving device. It is still more disturbing to the
machine-worshiper to time the intermissions in German theaters, and to
find that waits of from two to five minutes are quite as frequent as
in America. The explanation, of course, is the costumes. “The stage was
all set in half a minute, but we had to wait for the tenor to get into
his blue tights.” It looks very much as if the _Maschineninspektoren_
should have introduced sliding wardrobes or adapted the harnessing
devices of fire-houses before they put thousands of dollars into
sliding stages.
The German technical men are beginning to chafe at the limitations of
the machines, to be content to push them into second place. If you talk
to Linnebach, at Dresden, once high priest of the sliding stage, you
will note with some surprise that the word _einfach_ has a Carolinian
way of getting into the conversation. Things must be simpler. No big
solid sets; instead, some curtains and lights and a dome on which to
project painted designs. The word _Podium_ also crops out. Like almost
all forward-looking artists and directors in Germany, Linnebach wants
to put the actor on a sort of tribune thrust out into the audience.
He wants to give him back the vital heritage of the Greek and the
medieval stages. Linnebach is content mechanically with the devices of
the electrician; when he mounted Hasenclever’s expressionist drama,
_Jenseits_, he made the setting out of light and shadow, a few chairs
and tables, only one or two set pieces, and some projected backgrounds.
Machinery like the sinking stage has advantages apart from its
ability to change heavy realistic sets. It is difficult to see how the
opening scene of Shaw’s _Pygmalion_, looking out to the street from
under the portico of Covent Garden, could be better created or more
quickly shifted than in Linnebach’s production. Certainly without the
ability to sink with ease the rear part of the stage three or four
feet, he could not have given us the natural effect of the street level
below the eyes of the audience and the actors. The great virtue of a
mechanical stage of this kind is not to shift scenery, so much as to
supply economically and quickly different levels for the actors to
play upon. The use of levels is one of the important advances of the
Continental theater since the war, and the sinking stage helps greatly
with this. With a few inner prosceniums and simple backgrounds, it can
supply, as it were, an infinite variety of formal stages such as the
Continental theater seems slowly to be tending toward.
[Illustration:
_Das Rheingold_: Alberich’s Cave. A setting by Linnebach and Pasetti
at the National Theater in Munich. An atmospheric scene produced by
lights playing across a frankly painted background which emphasizes
the rocky converging lines of a cavern.
]
Barring the realistic and the formal, there is a middle ground in
which the machine is of little value compared with the designer. In
Linnebach’s theater—though not from his designs—a Hindu romance,
_Vasantasena_, was mounted frankly and freshly against flat settings
in the style of Indian miniatures. This was accomplished, without the
aid of stage machinery, by the use of a permanent setting or portal of
Indian design, with steps and a platform, on which, framed within an
inner proscenium, drops and profiles were changed much as we would
change them. The artist, Otto Hettner, supplied a style, as well as a
formal stage, which made the machine taboo. Working with Pasetti at
the National Theater in Munich, Linnebach accomplished the changes of
_Das Rheingold_ quite as easily. In an older production at Dresden,
under Hasait, the fields of the gods opposite Valhalla were made of
bulky platforms and plastic rocks, which went rolling back behind the
cyclorama while up from the basement came in one piece the cave of the
Nibelungen with its nooks and corners, its overhanging ceiling, and
its whole equipment of plastic canvas rocks, which might have come
out of some cavern on a scenic railway. In Munich the simpler levels
of the fields in the second scene served in the cave scene also. They
were lost in the shadows, along with the side walls, which were hardly
more than masking curtains. The rocky cave was suggested wholly by
the backdrop. This was painted in broken, converging lines of rock
formations. Because of the magic of light, it did not seem like some
conventional old backdrop.
The spirit of the theater as it has developed since the war seems to
call upon the designer and _régisseur_ instead of the mechanician.
When artists were building heavy and cumbersome settings, elaborate in
physical proportions if not in design, sliding and revolving stages
were unquestionably necessary, though we may well ask how much the
presence of the mechanisms tempted the artists into such excess.
To-day, however, the setting is being stylized, the stage itself made
formal. Machinery becomes irrelevant. Copeau does not need it even for
the realistic _Les Frères Karamazov_; the Redoutensaal is almost too
innocent to suspect its existence. _Régisseurs_ of the new sort want
something more theatrical than a turntable that any round-house might
boast.
The playwright works with the _régisseur_ and the artist to this same
end. While Dorothy Richardson, Waldo Frank, and James Joyce are busy
taking the machinery out of the novel, the playwrights are making
machinery unnecessary for drama. They drop “atmosphere,” and take up
the soul. They seek the subjective instead of the physical. They want
to thrill us with the mysteries and clarities of the unconscious,
instead of cozening us with photographic detail or romantic color. For
all this they need imagination in setting, not actuality. Form carries
the spirit up and out. Indications speak to it louder than actualities.
Design, which is of the spirit, drives out mechanism, which is of the
brain.
The day of the machine is over in the theater, the day of its
domination at any rate. For a time it looked as though the name of the
old theater in the Tuileries would have to be painted over every stage
door in Germany—La Salle des Machines. Now the stage machine is sinking
into its proper place—the cellar. A new device is lording it in the
theater, but it cannot be called a machine. The electric light is not
a mechanical thing. It is miraculously animated by something very like
the Life Force, and night by night its living rays are directed to new
and unforeseen ends.
CHAPTER VI
LIGHT AS SETTING
In the ’eighties and the ’nineties, when electricity came into the
theater to take the place of gas, light was only illumination. By
the first decade of the twentieth century it had become atmosphere.
To-day it is taking the place of setting in many Continental theaters.
To-morrow it may be part of drama itself.
In 1893 a Swiss doctor named Adolphe Appia published a little book in
French on the production of Wagner’s music-dramas; six years later he
elaborated his ideas in a volume published in a German translation as
_Die Musik und die Inscenierung_, the first and perhaps the greatest
book of theory on the new art of the theater. Among other things,
he discussed lighting at great length. He made a very important
observation. He noted that the lighting of the stage of his day was
hardly more than mere illumination—something to make all objects
equally bright and visible. It was quite as necessary, he believed,
to make certain objects more visible than others, and to make them
more living, more dramatic. At the time the lighting apparatus of the
theater was crude, because the electric light was in its infancy.
There were only small electric bulbs, arranged in rows for footlights
below and borderlights overhead, to supply flat illumination, and arc
lights, which were movable and could be made to “spot” out figures
more brilliantly. Appia recognized in these last the means for making
the figure of the actor brilliant and dynamic. With his eye on these
spotlights he made an unheard-of demand. He asked for shadows. He said
that light and shade gave three dimensions to the player and three
dimensions to the setting (provided, as he suggested, the setting be
made plastic instead of flat). By means of light he wanted to link the
living actor and the dead setting. He went further than using shadows
and animating the background. He proposed that the play of light
throughout an act should express the mood and action. He wanted it to
change with the development of the play. He made elaborate analyses
of the Wagner music-dramas to show how the light could play a part—an
active part—in the setting and the action.
During the next decade, the beginning of the twentieth century, an
Italian named Fortuny began the first practical work of progress
in stage lighting. Not very permanent work, perhaps, but certainly
valuable because it struck out in new directions. His devices have
all but disappeared from the German theater; but only because they
have been replaced by improvements along the lines he indicated.
Fortuny tried to improve the quality of the light by using indirect
illumination. He threw light from powerful arcs against colored bands
of silk, which reflected it onto the stage. This had two advantages.
The light was diffused and broken up. The color could be controlled at
a distance by cords that moved the various silk bands past the light.
Fortuny also tried to improve the surface on which the light fell. He
devised a domed silk sky or _Kuppelhorizont_, into which the greater
part of his diffused light was thrown, to be diffused still further.
Incidentally he hoped to achieve a better sky-effect. Disadvantages
hampered both his devices. Indirect lighting required far more current
than direct and created a great deal of heat. The dome was produced by
exhausting air from between two curved surfaces of silk, the outer one
fastened to a folding frame of steel; creases and joints showed in the
silk and air was likely to leak in and collapse the sky.
In the course of another ten years engineering ingenuity supplied
substitutes for both these elements of the Fortuny System. Most
important was the discovery of how to manufacture incandescent bulbs
almost as powerful as arc lights. Such bulbs, equipped with frosted
glass and glass mediums or color screens, could not only supply light
sufficiently diffused in tone and under easy control, but they also
produced the shadows, as well as the light, which Appia wanted. The
sky-dome became literally a fixture in the German theater when some
one decided to make it out of plaster instead of silk. To-day the
high-powered bulb and the plaster sky are everywhere in the German
theater. Schwabe in Berlin and Phillips in Holland have succeeded
in making bulbs of the enormous power of 3,000 watts or 6,000
candle-power, bulbs about three times as strong as any incandescent
lights used in America in 1922. The dome, or some variety of it, is
found in practically every German theater. Linnebach estimates that
there are twenty true _Kuppelhorizonts_, cupping the whole stage with a
curving dome; ten permanent _Rundhorizonts_, plaster cycloramas curving
like a great semi-circular wall around the stage; and thirty canvas
cycloramas which are quite as large as the _Rundhorizont_, and some of
which are so hung as to make a most convenient and efficient substitute
for either variety of plaster sky.
The most interesting and significant departures in the use of light
on the Continental stage have to do with this substitute for the old
backdrop. It began as an imitation of the sky, an attempt to put one
more piece of Realism into the theater. It has got to the point now
where its really interesting and important uses have nothing whatever
to do with realistic fake-heavens. It is being employed as a formal
element in a stage design, or else as a surface on which to paint
scenery with light.
Perhaps it was economy, perhaps a flash of genius, but it occurred to
the Germans that there was no particular necessity of lighting the
dome or cyclorama. In these huge stages it stands at least sixty or
seventy feet back of the footlights. It is possible, therefore, to make
it a dim emptiness by merely turning off the lights that ordinarily
shine upon it, or to give it some vague neutral quality from the light
upon the stage which is reflected onto the _Horizont_. In _Othello_
at the State Schauspielhaus in Berlin, Jessner uses his cyclorama, an
ordinary canvas one, as a formal background bounding the space in which
his strictly conventionalized indications of settings are placed. Thus
it is in some scenes a pale neutral wall, in some a curious violet
emptiness, in others a faintly salmon background, in still another a
yellow light against which figures move in tiny silhouettes. At the
Volksbühne in _Masse-Mensch_ the dome becomes a misty void in one of
the dream-scenes; and then upon this void move vast, mysterious shadows
in circling procession.
Shadows on the dome carry us to a final development of lighting
in Germany—the “projection” of scenery, the substitution of light
for paint as a means of expression. Many minds have worked and are
working on devices to be used for this purpose, but the most important
mechanisms find their home in Dresden at the theaters of Linnebach and
of Hasait.
As might be expected, Linnebach’s is the simpler. He has a dome in
his theater, the State Schauspielhaus, and upon this dome or through
varnished silk from the back, he throws, by means of a very simple
lantern containing an arc light but no lenses, the designs painted on
glass. This lantern and the transparent method of projection were used
in America with much success by Lee Simonson when the New York Theater
Guild mounted Shaw’s _Back to Methuselah_ in the spring of 1922.
Linnebach has made the mountains of _Wilhelm Tell_ with projection and
the settings of Grabbe’s _Kaiser Heinrich VI_, and of the expressionist
dramas _Das Bist Du_, _Gas_, and _Jenseits_.
Hasait’s simplest method of projection brings you up sharp against the
true origins of the thing, and they are almost as old as drama. The
puppeteers of old Java had shadow-marionettes centuries before the
technical director of the Dresden State Opera made shadow-settings.
For Weber’s _Oberon_ and for Mozart’s _Zauberflöte_, Hasait provides a
plastic arrangement of inner proscenium and steps, with a translucent
curtain at the back. From one side of the curtain he projects a design
in shadows by means of a frame hardly two feet wide across which are
fastened various thicknesses of gauze. The light that comes through
the clearer portions of the gauze is one color, while from a light on
the other side of the translucent curtain he stains the shadows with a
second color. The hue of both these lights can be changed quickly or
slowly as desired, producing harmonies and contrasts of color.
The other devices used by Hasait for projection are embodied in
a scheme of stage equipment called the Ars System by the Swedish
company that controls the patents for its exploitation abroad. The
basis of the system is a canvas cyclorama. This cyclorama runs on a
semi-circular track hung from the gridiron high above the stage. At
one end of the track is a great roller upon which the cyclorama may
be wound up, to get it out of the way during an elaborate change of
scene. It takes only half a minute for the cyclorama to be run out on
the track ready for use. The track itself may be swung downward from
its two front corners to permit particularly large drops to be hoisted
or lowered; but it is wide enough and deep enough not to interfere with
the ordinary use of the gridiron. The cyclorama is made of common light
canvas, but it is so cut and joined, and hung on a slight slant that
it takes up of itself the bulges and wrinkles ordinarily produced in
our cycloramas by a change in weather. The invention of this cyclorama
is in dispute between those ancient but courteous rivals, Hasait and
Linnebach.
With this cyclorama goes an elaborate system of lighting manufactured
by Schwabe. There are floor lamps, contained in wheeled chariots, to
illuminate the bottom of the cyclorama. Above the proscenium opening
hangs a battery of different colored lights—seventy-two in the
Stockholm State Opera—which play directly upon the cyclorama, and three
high-powered bulbs to light the stage floor. Besides these, the Ars
System, as installed at Stockholm, includes three special projection
devices also hung above the proscenium, all the adjustments of which
are controlled electro-magnetically from the switchboard. One of these
is the large cloud-machine, an arrangement of two tiers of eight lamps
each, raying out from a common axis. These tiers can move at different
speeds and in different directions, while each lamp can be turned up
and down and sideways at will. These projectors each house a 6,000
candle-power bulb and hold a photograph or drawing of a cloud. The
complex motion of these static clouds when projected on the cyclorama
gives an effect of every-varying cloud formations. Almost absolute
Realism can thus be obtained. A second and smaller and less flexible
cloud-machine with a single central lamp and reflecting mirrors is, for
some reason, included in the equipment.
Besides these cloud-machines there is a battery of three high-powered
bulbs and lenses, by means of which designs painted on glass slides may
be projected after the fashion of a magic lantern upon the cyclorama
or any object on the stage. This is the really important feature of
the Ars System from an artistic standpoint. Its possibilities are
extraordinary. Harald André, chief _régisseur_ of the Stockholm Opera,
has experimented little as yet with this device, utilizing it only in
one ballet. But he has speculated much on the opportunities that it
presents for uniting a large group of theaters, similarly equipped, in
the exchange of scenic designs for the productions in their repertory.
André believes that the economy of projected scenery is important
artistically, as well as financially, because it will permit of
experiment with many new works at slight expense, and of the rapid
reproduction of the successful pieces in many cities at once.
From the absolute, artistic viewpoint of the effect obtained,
projection is most satisfactory, though as yet almost undeveloped.
Americans who saw the translucent projections of Simonson’s designs
in _Back to Methuselah_ realized how little these drops had the
visual disadvantages of the painted variety. They enjoyed a certain
incorporeal quality. The landscapes were not defined like huge oil
paintings in false perspective. They went into some new category which,
for the moment, defeated our analysis. Such projections may in time
take on the shallow pretense of painted backdrops, though I am inclined
to doubt it.
[Illustration:
_Das Rheingold: Valhalla._ A setting by Linnebach and Pasetti. The
gods are grouped in deep shadow on a conventionalized arrangement of
rocky levels in the foreground. The castle becomes slowly visible in
the sky beyond, built of beams of light, hanging in the air like a
great cumulus cloud. At the National Theater, Munich.
]
In the case of the Valhalla of _Das Rheingold_, as projected in
Linnebach’s production at the National Theater in Munich, the ethereal
quality of this kind of “painting” again stands out. The scene is most
successful when the lighting is dimmest. In the central portions of the
second and fourth scenes, when the stage is fully lighted, the image
of Valhalla holds its own against the illumination of the foreground,
but the foreground itself fails dismally to match the beauty of the
gods’ castle. When the plastic foreground is not to be seen, Valhalla
hangs in the heavens like one of the shapes of Wilfred’s Color Organ,
a thing that seems to have three dimensions. When the lights upon
the stage floor bring out the rocks of the foreground, Valhalla loses
the reality of three dimensions. It still seems truer, as well as more
beautiful, than the rocks in front. In fact it shows up pitilessly the
trivial canvas life of those boulders. But it loses the impression
of depth, which it had at first created. This was doubtless a false
impression, a foolish illusion.
The projected setting is certainly in another dimension spiritually
from those two ordinarily employed in old-fashioned scene painting.
It is not in any of the planes of stage-rocks or houses. It does not,
however, war with the human figure, curiously enough. It seems likely
that the artist or director using projected design must formalize his
foreground, as Simonson did, or else hide its commonplace actuality
in shadow. Ordinary stage pretenses cannot stand beside the spiritual
plastics produced by light.
As for the cloud-machine, so long as it is trying merely to reproduce
nature it is utterly unimportant. Something imaginative must be done
with it before it can expect serious consideration. In the productions
of André at the Stockholm Opera there are at least two hints that
the cloud-machine can be used for the purposes of art. One of these,
rather poorly managed, is the use of designed clouds instead of natural
clouds in one of the scenes of _Samson and Delilah_. The other, not
perfectly executed by any means, but most suggestive, occurs in
Verdi’s _Macbeth_. There in the first scene André sets a wild storm
sky in motion. He uses negative or black photographs of clouds instead
of positive or white, and he starts them moving from on high and at
the sides, sweeping in and down upon the witches. As these dark shapes
descend in tumult, it seems as though the black earth were drinking
black clouds, curious and evil portent of the powers of the infernal.
Movement in projection has obviously great possibilities as part of
the action of new drama. In Kaiser’s expressionist play _From Morn to
Midnight_, produced by the Theater Guild, Simonson used Linnebach’s
lantern to make the tree in the snow scene change into a skeleton, an
effect that Kaiser was able to foresee only as a shifting of snowflakes
upon naked boughs.
Light itself seems destined to assume a larger and larger part in the
drama. It is a playing force, quite as much as the actors. It can be
a motivator of action as well as an illuminator of it. Jessner at the
State Schauspielhaus in Berlin uses it as an arbitrary accompaniment
and interpreter of action. Lights flash on or off as some mood changes.
They create shadows to dramatize a relation of two men. They seem to
control or to be controlled by the action. The extent to which a change
of light may express the dramatist’s conception is most interestingly
suggested in the scene of Macbeth’s death in André’s production of the
opera. It is an uncommonly well handled scene in all respects, perhaps
the best example of this director’s fine imagination. The fight between
the armies begins in a gray light before the walls of Dunsinane. There
is no absurd effort of supers to look like death-crazed warriors. The
quality of pursuit and conflict is caught in the pose of the bands of
the soldiers as they run past the walls bent down like dogs upon a
blood-scent. Macbeth and Macduff meet for a clear moment of conflict,
then they are surrounded and covered by the troops that rush to see
their champions do battle. At the moment when Macbeth falls, the crowd
clears for a moment. And then the grayness of morning breaks sharply
into dawn as evil goes out of the play. An obvious symbolism, perhaps,
but obviousness is not so great a failing in the theater. The fault of
the scene is only in André’s over-emphasis upon the light, or rather
his under-emphasis upon the cause of the light—the death of Macbeth.
At the moment when the light goes on, there should come some supreme,
arresting gesture, something to absorb every atom of our attention
so that we may wonderingly discover the light as a thing caused by
Macbeth, not by an electrician.
Such a scene suggests wide possibilities. Light as the compelling force
of a play; light as a motivator of action; light and setting, not as a
background to action, but as part of it, as something making characters
exist and act; light as an almost physical aura of human bodies; light,
therefore, in conflict. Physical contacts are not a necessity of the
theater. Under Jessner, the murderer of Clarence in _Richard III_ does
not try to seem to stab him; he simply plunges the dagger at him. That
is enough. In _Francesca da Rimini_ as Duse sometimes gave it, I have
heard that when the husband killed Paola with his sword the space
of the whole room separated them. It was as if the sword possessed
an aura, and as if the aura slew. In _Masse-Mensch_ the crowd of
revolutionaries go down to the mere rattle of machine guns before the
curtains are drawn to show the soldiers.
If light can do such things, even if it can do no more than signal the
downfall of evil or set Valhalla glowing in the heavens, it will take a
place in the theater that no other product of inventive ingenuity can
reach. Light, at the very least, is machinery spiritualized.
CHAPTER VII
THE GERMAN ACTOR
Four years of war left the elaborate machinery of the German theaters
intact. Four years of the purgatory called peace have even seen a sharp
advance in electrical equipment. Critics and managers of the victorious
nations and of the neutrals that enjoy a sound exchange may complain
of the quantity and quality of theater-goers; but the vanquished have
suffered less. At forty performances in Germany and Austria we saw
hardly two rows of vacant seats all told in the dramatic theaters,
though one or two musical shows were no more than two-thirds full.
The German theater has suffered, however, in one spot. The unfortunate
truth is that it is a vital spot—acting. Only the richness of trained
talent in its post-war companies enables it to suffer the drain of
the past years and still give performances far better than we see in
England or America.
War affected the German actor less than it did the actor in the
allied countries; Germany kept her players on the home front fighting
disheartenment. Peace and the movies, however, brought dispersal.
Companies were scattered, players exiled. The spectacular collapse,
of course, was the dissolution of Max Reinhardt’s famous company
that filled his two Berlin theaters. Moissi, Bassermann, Pallenberg,
Konstantin, Eibenschütz, Wegener, Dietrich, Arnold, Lehman, Eysoldt,
Bertens, Diegelmann, Heims, Jannings, Schildkraut—not one of these
names appears on the _Zettel_ outside the old Reinhardt houses. Some
are in the movies and some are stars, but all are gone.
If American films could have entered Germany in the face of the
depreciated mark, Reinhardt’s theaters might still be giving true
repertory, Reinhardt himself might still be there, and certainly many
of the old company would be playing together in Berlin. Other factors,
personal, financial, and artistic, gradually drew Reinhardt out of
production, but he himself declared with much truth that repertory was
impossible when actors had to give their days to the movies, instead
of to rehearsals, and that the theater was impossible for him without
repertory and actors. As for the players themselves, with the mark at a
cent and pomade at two hundred marks, it had to be either the movies or
stardom.
The star system of England and America, imported into Germany, has
done little to keep even the popular players in Berlin. The audience
is exhausted sooner than in New York or London, and then tours must
come. Alexander Moissi knocks about Switzerland and Austria. Leopoldine
Konstantin, the flashing slave girl of _Sumurûn_, is supposed to be
starring in Vienna, but you find her one night at _Der Blaue Vogel_,
the imitation _Chauve-Souris_ which one of Balieff’s assistants
installed in Berlin. Pallenberg goes up and down the country with _Der
Wauwau_, the German edition of _Grumpy_.
Even the younger stars are wanderers. That fresh exotic, Maria Orska,
competes with the traveling troupe of the Moscow Art Theater for
the patronage of Stockholm. She plays in the cosmopolitan German of
a Russian, against the Swedish of a resident company. The play is
Wedekind’s _Erdgeist_, first half of that staggering duology of sex
which ends with _Pandora’s Box_ and Jack the Ripper, and goes under the
name of _Lulu_. In Berlin Mme. Orska is thought a little sensational.
Her Lulu is anything but that. She does not dwell on the corporeality
of this daughter of earth’s joy. Her Lulu is not a human being made
hideous and fascinating with eternal lures. She is a kind of mask, a
thin mask, a shell of tinted and whitened silks over a face sucked dry
of all but passion and the shrunken charms of decadence. She is a sort
of doll—a _Pritzelpuppe_—with her long black legs and her pale face
thrust out from either end of a pierrot’s costume. Very much of a doll
when the play is most bitterly cruel. Dr. Goll flops to the floor,
dead, when he finds her with Schwartz. Orska tiptoes stiffly towards
him, manœuvers past his body like some marionette, pokes him with a
stiff toe and squeaks the squeak of a doll. Is it fear or pleasure or
both? A clever way to do Wedekind. But, in the end, night after night
with only self-display to remember.
But Berlin—or Stockholm—is not Germany. There is ensemble left in some
of the lesser cities—there is even ensemble in Berlin at the State
Schauspielhaus, if there is no great individual playing there.
The illustrious old Burgtheater in Vienna still has a company, if it
lacks a distinguished director. They manage portions of Tolstoi’s _The
Living Corpse_ very well. They give the episode of the gypsies’ singing
to Fedya and Mascha as it was never given in our own _Redemption_. In
the Burgtheater it is no discreet cabaret turn. The women and the men
hang over the lovers. Their song is a frank and touching celebration
of the love that their Mascha has won. It is an open display of
sentimental interest in love-making, which people only admit when
wine or perhaps gypsy blood have stilled inhibitions. But all this
is doubtless more a matter of direction than of acting. It is in the
old mother of Frau Senders, the aristocrats of Frau Wilbrand and Herr
Herterich, not quite so much so in the Fedya of Herr Treszler that
you find real playing. It is hardly possible that the performance of
Vildrac’s _The S. S. Tenacity_ is the best that the Burgtheater gives;
but it is a most excellent performance. It is peculiarly excellent,
because, while it is not French, it seems so little German in a racial
sense. Artistically, of course, it is most decidedly Teuton. It has
the hard, firm quality of German acting. Copeau’s production in Paris
is a rational thing; it is almost like a reading, a very intelligent,
sensitive reading. In New York we played it in flashes of misgiving
and determination; it was unctuous in Augustin Duncan’s roustabout
and in Claude Cooper’s English sailor, and fine and sensitive in
Marguerite Forrest’s rather ladylike barmaid; but the rest dropped in
and out of illusion. The Viennese actors play for a bright and firm
actuality, which they imagine is French. It isn’t precisely German,
but technically it is as Teuton in thorough-going emotionalism as the
passionate kiss with which the Viennese players replaced the salute on
the nape of the neck with which the French Bastien begins his wooing.
Individual acting as well as ensemble flourishes in the large company
that serves the four State theaters of Munich. It is a piece of good
fortune that both opera and drama are under a single management, and
that pieces may be given in any one of four houses—the small modernist
Künstler Theater of Max Littmann in the Ausstellungspark, the tiny,
wickedly cheerful old Residenz Theater, the reformist “amphitheater”
which Littmann created in the Prinzregenten Theater, or the National
Theater, just as much the conventional old-fashioned German opera house
as when it was called the Hoftheater. The large company and the breadth
of repertory which these theaters permit to be given efficiently and
properly, provides some exceptional players exceptionally well-trained
and in an interesting variety of parts.
The Munich group can give that shock of virtuosity which the German
repertory theaters provide, and give it to you at highest voltage. On
one evening, for example, you discover in _The Taming of the Shrew_
a most exceptional Grumio. His name is Richard Kellerhals, and he is
the sort of clown that happens once in ten years in America. He is
not a Charlie Chaplin, because that is a little too much to ask. But
he outdoes any other movie-comic that I can recall. He is not a Jim
Barton, because he does not drive ahead at just one thing—Gargantuan
burlesque. Kellerhals plays Grumio with his face and his legs and
his brain. His odd, wizened little face, inordinately simple, just a
bit loony; his acrobatic legs, quick and comic, getting him into all
manner of strange places; his brain, always alert behind the mask of
the loon, working out a dozen amusing twists of business. It seems a
highly original performance, though perhaps it is merely tradition
in Germany that Grumio should sniff the clothes of Biondello, and be
sniffed at, all within the bounds of decency, but very like two dogs
of their masters. At any rate, original or not, it is the sort of
sharp, brilliant fooling that would make Kellerhals a musical comedy
specialist in America, perhaps a star.
An evening or two later, out at the Ausstellungspark you see
Hauptmann’s play of the Peasants’ Rebellion, _Florian Geyer_.
Almost the first figure you notice among the peasants who are trying
desperately to make themselves far-seeing leaders in the fight against
the trained nobles, is a gaunt fellow with his head in a bloody
bandage, and with fever in his eyes. This is Geyer’s brother-in-law and
secretary in the field, a boy almost on the point of death who looks
like a sickened man of thirty. The desperate impatience of the worn
is mingled in his face with the fanatical devotion of the men who win
lost causes. The cause _is_ lost in the end, and after he has watched
this disillusion pile upon quarrels and jealousies and treasons, he
crumples up and dies. Every word of his tragedy you can read in his
face. When you look at your program you find that the name of the actor
is Richard Kellerhals. In America—if Kellerhals had acted this part
before Grumio—he would be competing with William B. Mack in the playing
of tortured gunmen the rest of his life.
Quite as good acting and almost as varied impersonations are to be
seen in the work of Friedrich Ulmer as Petruchio and as Geyer. His
Geyer—strong, simple, desperate in anger—is easy to imagine on our
stage; Lionel Barrymore could do it. But his Petruchio—a coarse,
bull-necked, and most amusing devil—is another matter. It sins against
the pretty romance of our Van Dyked Shakespeare. And it is famously
good fun, along with the whole riotous show.
Dresden has a company that makes no difficulty over playing Shaw’s
_Pygmalion_ one night, in German provincial accents that are supposed
to approximate the English dialects pursued and recorded by Professor
Higgins under the portico of Covent Garden, and over playing the next
night a comic and poetic romance of India called _Vasantasena_ by
a king called Sudraka. Here the women come out rather more sharply
than most of the men, two fine performances in particular by Melitta
Leithner as Eliza, the flower girl, and Alice Verden as Vasantasena.
The company cannot escape, however, a beefy German tenor-hero, one of
the sort that seems in danger any moment of turning into a leading
woman with a heavy beard.
Frankfort has perhaps less real acting talent than is to be found in
any of the State theaters of the larger cities. It shows an atrocious
performance of _Peer Gynt_. Yet, given direction such as Richard
Weichert furnishes in Schiller’s _Maria Stuart_, and it seems a company
of genius. Carl Ebert, a bad Peer Gynt, manages a Leicester of real
subtlety; the Elizabeth of Gerda Müller seems a tempestuous horror, and
the whole thing is lighted by many excellent small bits of acting.
There seems to be a certain hard, uncompromising insistence in all
German acting. It is a thing, perhaps, of narrow spirit and deep
intensity. It has unquestioned vitality. In Grabbe’s old drama,
_Napoleon_, which Jessner gives at the State Schauspielhaus in Berlin,
this vitality leaps to union most happily with the intoxication that
Bonaparte spread about him always, and never more extraordinarily than
in the Hundred Days which this play chronicles. It is all vitality,
the impatient vitality of the soldiers of Wolfgang Heinz and Lothar
Müthel, who await Napoleon’s return, the besotted and sinister vitality
of the new mob of the _carmagnole_, the energizing vitality of Rudolf
Forster’s Wellington, the sober, slow but potent vitality of Arthur
Krauszneck’s Blücher, and that font of indomitable self-assertion
Napoleon himself, played by Ludwig Hartau. Even the old Humpty-Dumpty
Louis of Leopold von Ledebur, and the courtiers who prop him up on
his throne take on a certain fixity of purpose—perhaps a deathly
fixity—from the vitality flowing round them.
In other performances of Jessner’s company this vitality flows over
into mere vigor, even into violence. That is the besetting sin of the
German actor. Fritz Kortner, celebrated for his Richard III and his
Othello, ranges from unnatural suppression of feeling, from studied
and almost whispered restraint, to mad screechings. An almost neurotic
violence crops up somewhere in every other performance in Germany. Even
the women fall into it. Gerda Müller’s Elizabeth, after an evening of
excellent, mastered power, breaks out into the hoarse-voiced raving
that seems more a mark of the male players. Sudden spurts of laying
it on too thick appear in some of the secondary players of _Florian
Geyer_. The comic villain of _Vasantasena_ plays the whole thing in a
knot of petty passion. It is ranting, this sort of thing, no matter
how far it may be from the orotund mouthings of our old-school players,
no matter how much sharp characterization and genuine passion may be
forced into it.
The performance of _Masse-Mensch_ at the Volksbühne in Berlin stands
out because it manages to carry intensity of feeling to a point just
short of violence, and then, with every excuse provided in this
desperate story of thwarted revolution, to bring it up short at the
right moment into high-pitched but beautiful vehemence. The outstanding
impression must be the astounding diction of the mob that speaks
clearly, rhythmically, and most movingly with a single common voice; it
gives you a sudden vision of what the Greek chorus may have been, and
why thirty thousand people listened. But the power of Mary Dietrich as
the Christ-figured, Christ-tortured woman is almost as unforgettable.
Looking back across these forty-odd performances, I find that a very
simple and very brief bit of acting stands out as sharply as any. It
is the quiet, sadly amusing, little Buddhist priest in _Vasantasena_
as played by Erich Ponto. It is not a thing the German stage often
discloses, this delicate mingling of humor and reverence. If it were,
the people from Moscow who played _The Cherry Orchard_ would not have
seemed to come from the one land where acting is a rounded and tempered
perfection.
CHAPTER VIII
NEW ACTING FOR OLD
Acting is the oldest thing in the theater. It comes before the play,
because in the beginning the actor and the playwright are one. Drama
originates when two or three people are seized with a desire to give an
old legend or an old ritual a living form. They want to act. As they
act they make up their play. The theater becomes the spot that seems a
good place—either spiritually, physically, or by force of tradition—in
which to give the play. In time comes a division of labor. One of the
actors begins to specialize on the play. This actor studies how he can
develop the form of the play to make better use of the theater; and
then, with some leader among the actors, he begins to speculate on how
to change the theater in order to give more scope to the playwright and
to the player who interprets him.
That is the history of the theater through twenty-five centuries. It
begins with the actor, and it comes very close to ending with him.
It is rather a good thing to understand about the history of the
theater. It gives you a certain respect for the actor which actors
do not always inspire. It makes you patient with the difficulties of
writing anything intelligible on this most ancient and most complex
and most unsubstantial of all the things of the theater. It makes you
realize the dangers of dogmatizing on the subject. And, if you can look
back with imagination to the day of Garrick and his great apron stage
and his Hamlet in knickerbockers, back to the day of Burbage and his
sunlit platform in the midst of an Elizabethan mob, back to Æschylus
answering the chorus of the Furies in the half circle of Athenians
that piled up the hillside of the Acropolis; perhaps, then, you will
see that the actor was not always a fellow with a false beard or the
manners of a soda water clerk, who expects you to believe that he is
no actor at all, but a family doctor or an employee of Mr. Liggett who
has taken to living in a room with one side gone. At any rate a little
hint of theatrical history, full of amazing surprises, might make you
tolerant of such speculations as the following on the four types of
acting to be seen in the theater to-day and on what is to come of them.
The art of acting is a miscellaneous sort of art. I imagine that
types of acting which we think very new and modern were to be found
in every age except the first. Probably some famous Greek comedian
made his entrance in _The Frogs_ looking so amazingly like the statue
of Herakles on the Acropolis that for half a minute nobody could be
sure that this was really the actor whom they had expected to see. In
Shakespeare’s day it is not unlikely that the man who played Caliban
got together a collection of false hair and wooden tusks which made
every one wonder who the new member of the company could be. And
probably among the Greeks and the Elizabethans there were players so
amazingly like servants or kings in face and carriage that they never
played anything else. Yet it is safe to say, nevertheless, that the
actor’s trick of trying to look like a different human being in each
new play and never at all like himself, and his other trick of never
looking like anything but himself and always playing exactly the same
kind of part, are histrionic symptoms of the disease called Realism.
There was never so much literal and deliberate impersonation as in
Europe to-day, and so much “type casting” as along Broadway.
These are two very different methods of work, but they both reach the
same end—absolute resemblance—and neither has necessarily anything to
do with art. The first—for which the word “impersonation” is commonly
and very loosely used—is pretty generally esteemed to-day. It is
considered to mark off the actor, even the artist, from the crowd of
clever mummers. It is hard to deny an instant and hearty interest
in any player who can look like and act like a tramp one night, and
like a barbaric king the next. The emotion he creates as a king, or
the artist’s vision he displays in selecting his material and making
Form out of it, may be great or small. But his ingenuity in masquerade
will always win admiration. In fact we are pretty sure to spend our
time praising such an actor as Ben-Ami for looking like a neurotic
artist in _Samson and Delilah_, and like a husky young horse-thief in
_The Idle Inn_, instead of recognizing the artistic distinction these
impersonations show.
Examined in cold blood, the virtue of this sort of acting is the
virtue of the wig-maker. The difference between a Van Dyke and a pair
of mutton chops; the difference between Flesh Color No. 1 and Flesh
Color No. 3; the difference between a waiter’s dress suit bought on
the Bowery, and a doublet designed by James Reynolds and made by Mme.
Freisinger—that is the secret of this kind of acting. Not the whole
secret, of course, for the pose of the actor’s body, the grace or
awkwardness of his carriage, the lift of an eyebrow, or the droop of
a lip is quite as important. Such things, however, have no more of
art or emotion in them than the tricks of make-up. They can give us
recollections of real persons or figures in literature, in painting, or
in other plays, about whom we have felt emotion. But it is not until
the actor puts Form of his own into this lay figure, by the movement of
his body, and the emotion of his voice, that anything approaching art
can be said to exist.
Stanislavsky may look like a colonel in _The Three Sisters_, and like
a spineless gentleman in _The Cherry Orchard_; but that is not the
measure of his art. Stanislavsky might even _be_ a colonel on leave who
took a fancy to acting, or a spineless gentleman who lost his patrimony
and fell back on his university reputation as an amateur actor; and he
would still have to prove himself an artist.
There is an amusing similarity and contrast between the two varieties
of realistic actors. The first impersonates a different character
in every play, and never himself. The second impersonates the same
character in every play and always himself. The first impersonates by
changing; the second by remaining the same.
Provided that there is a large and varied supply of types—military men,
bar-keeps, politicians, artist-neurotics, criminal-neurotics, he-men,
she-men, rabbit-men, not to mention all sorts of women—the result on
a play should not be so very different whichever system of acting is
adopted. If a play-goer were to see only one play, he couldn’t detect
any difference. If he were to see two, he would be likely to get some
added pleasure out of the knowledge that the same people were acting
both, and he would probably use up on the business of spying out the
tricks of it all a good deal of the energy and attention that he ought
to give to the play.
There is one practical difference, however, in these two ways of
casting a play. You cannot make a repertory company out of types. In
spite of the old jargon about Leading Man, Leading Woman, Juvenile, Old
Man, Ingenue, Heavy, Character Man, and so forth, no permanent company
giving realistic plays can get along without actors who can achieve
some sort of differentiation. Since the German theater and most of
the European theater is run on the repertory system, the Continental
actor is generally a man adept in masquerade. Because America has no
repertory theater, because producers in New York pick new actors out
of the apple barrel for every new play, and because almost all the
legitimate actors of America make New York their headquarters, the
system of casting by type is the natural, workable system for us.
Type acting need not mean that the type the actor plays is absolutely
identical with his own personality in private life. It usually isn’t.
But it does mean that, because of his own personality, his physical and
mental equipment, the actor is able to play a very similar type to his
own. Two excellent examples of this are Frank Craven and Ernest Truex.
In real life they are never Tommy Tucker of _The First Year_ or the
hero of _Six Cylinder Love_, but on the stage they are never anything
else. It is just possible that they could be something else, but they
began this way, and this way the managers and the public will probably
make them continue.
All of which brings up a single artistic point upon which varied
impersonations and the repertory theater defeat type casting. Type
casting is apt to tie a man to the kind of part he first acts with
any ability, and not the kind he can act best. He may be able to
play ten different sorts of characters, and one or two of these may
release something in him that permits him to be a true artist in
his impersonation. But if he happens to play some other of the ten
characters first, and play it reasonably well, our casting system may
keep him from ever reaching those characters in which he might excel.
For another thing, the constant change of parts in a repertory theater
gives an actor practice that he cannot get if he repeats type parts
in fewer plays, as he must do in America. Through this practice with
varying parts, he may come to add something of artistic significance to
his work.
A nice esthetic point arises if you find a type-actor—say Craven—giving
an extraordinarily good performance. He is playing himself, we will
say; yet within that familiar personality, he is achieving just as
interesting emotion as some other actor of a different personality,
but possessing the knack of varied impersonation, could achieve; he is
even reaching a sense of Form, selecting out of his own personality,
experience, and emotion, and combining these into a shape that moves us
esthetically—whether to laughter or to tears. Is this art? Would it be
art if the actor were Georgie Price imitating Craven, or somebody from
the Moscow Art Theater impersonating Craven? Would it be art if Craven
played a character so different from himself as the _savant_ in _He
Who Gets Slapped_, and played it as successfully as he has played Tommy
Tucker? Unquestionably the answer to the last question would be Yes. As
for the others, there is legitimate room for argument.
This business of varied impersonation _versus_ self-impersonation
arouses a great deal of dispute. The most interesting feature of
the squabble is that usually the opponent of self-impersonation or
type-acting points back with mournful pride to some of the great actors
of the past like Booth or Forrest. When he does this, he passes clean
outside of realistic acting. Moreover, he brings into the argument
actors, who, while they played a wide variety of parts, never took the
trouble to hide behind the wig-maker or to pretend to be anybody else
physically than the great Edwin Booth or the celebrated Edwin Forrest.
To-day we have this same kind of acting, I imagine—and this is the
third kind that I want to list—in the work of Sarah Bernhardt, Giovanni
Grasso, Margaret Anglin, or Clare Eames. If you started out to list
the players who use their own mask frankly for every part, achieving
impersonation and emotion by their use of features and voice as
instruments, you would find many more names of women than of men; for
the actress has far fewer opportunities than the actor to employ the
ingenuities of make-up. You would also find, I think, that your list
was not so very long, and that it contained the names of most of the
players of great distinction from Eleanora Duse to Charlie Chaplin.
There is magic in the soul of such players, not in their make-up
boxes. They create their impersonations before your eyes, not in their
dressing rooms. You may, perhaps, be tempted to say that their art lies
in the voice, that the face is a mask. But the face is obviously not a
permanent mask; it changes not only from character to character in many
subtle ways, but from scene to scene, and emotion to emotion. Also,
there is Chaplin, the voiceless; his face speaks. It seems a mask, too,
but it is articulate.
Such acting may be given—and usually is given—to the interpretation
of realistic drama. It belongs at heart to another thing, to almost
another age, past or to come. It achieves the necessary resemblance
through the inner truth of its art. But it never submits to
submergence. It reaches out towards a kind of acting that we used to
have and that we will have again, while it meets the necessities of
Realism.
This fourth kind of acting may be called presentational—a word that
derives its present use from a distinction set up by Alexander Bakshy
in his _The Path of the Russian Stage_. Presentational acting, like
presentational production, stands in opposition to representational.
The distinction is clear enough in painting, where a piece of
work that aims to report an anecdote, or to photograph objects,
is representational, and a piece of work striving to show the
relation of forms which may or may not be of the everyday world, is
presentational. In the theater Bakshy makes a parallel distinction
between a scenic background that attempts to represent with canvas
and paint actual objects of wood or rock or whatnot, and a background
that presents itself frankly as what it is—curtains, for instance, or
an architectural wall. The distinction applies to acting as well. A
Broadway actor in a bald wig or an actor naturally bald, who is trying
to pretend that he is in a room off in Budapest, and who refuses to
admit that he knows it is all a sham, and that a thousand people are
watching him, is a representational actor, or a realist. An actor
who admits that he is an actor, and that he has an audience before
him, and that it is his business to charm and move this audience by
the brilliance of his art, is a presentational actor. The difference
deserves better terms, but they do not yet exist.
It is obvious enough that the first actors were presentational. The
Greek men who shouted village gossip from the wains, and made plays of
it, were villagers known to every one. The actors in the first dramatic
rituals may have worn masks, but they were frankly actors or priests,
not the gods and heroes themselves. Roscius was Roscius, Molière
was Molière; even the Baconians cannot deny that Shakespeare was
Shakespeare when he appeared as old Adam. I would maintain that Garrick
and Siddons, Talma and Rachel were frankly actors; did they not see
the audience out there under the light of the same chandeliers that lit
their stage?
To-day our greatest players reëstablish to some extent the bond
with the audience when they abandon any attempt to represent
their characters through wigs and make-up, and present their own
faces frankly as vehicles of expression. In comedy and in tragedy
presentational acting comes out most easily. There is something in
really great sorrow—not the emotions of the thwarted defectives of our
realistic tragedies—that leaps out to an audience. Hecuba must speak
her sorrow to the chorus and over the chorus to the people who have
come to the theater for the single purpose of hearing it. There can be
no fitting communion with the characters who have caused the tragedy or
been stricken by it. The sufferer must carry her cup of sorrow to the
gods; they alone can drink of it and make it less. And the great fact
of the theater is that the audience are gods. It is a healthy instinct
that causes many an actress in a modern tragedy to turn her back on the
other characters of the play, and make her lamentation to the audience
as though it were a soliloquy or an aside.
There are gods and gods, of course, and it is to Dionysus and Pan
that the comedian turns when he shouts his jokes out across the
footlights. In fact he takes good care, if he is a wise clown, that
the footlights shan’t be there to interfere. If he is Al Jolson, he
insists on a runway or a little platform that will bring him out over
the footlights and into the lap of the audience. If he is a comedian
in burlesque like Bobbie Clark, he has the house lights turned up as
soon as he begins a comedy scene. He must make contact somehow with his
audience. If the fun-maker is Fanny Brice, the method is a little less
obvious, and it draws us closer to the sort of presentational acting
which will dominate many theaters in the future, the sort of acting
that presents an impersonation, and at the same time stands off with
the audience, and watches it. If the player is Ruth Draper or Beatrice
Herford, you have something that seems to me almost identical with the
kind of acting I am trying to define.
I present these four categories of acting for what they are worth. They
are frankly two-dimensional. They are divisions in a single plane.
Other planes cut across them, and the categories in these planes
intersect the ones I have defined. Consider almost any player, and
you will find a confusion of methods and results which will need more
explanation than I have provided. There is Richard Kellerhals, for
instance, the Munich player whose strikingly different work in _The
Taming of the Shrew_ and _Florian Geyer_ I have described. This is
not impersonation achieved with make-up. It is a thing of expression,
a spiritual thing. Take the actors of the Moscow Art Theater. They
use make-up to the last degree, but there is always a spiritual
differentiation far more significant than the physical, and there is
always a sense of the Form of life more important than either. Harry
Lauder has one impersonation—The Saftest of the Family—which is so
different from his others in almost every way that for the moment he
might be a different player. Here is a presentational actor indulging
in the tricks of the realistic impersonator, and showing that, while
the fields of realistic impersonation and presentational acting are not
absolutely exclusive, at least they are somewhat incongruous or at any
rate mutually hampering. Louis Jouvet of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier
presents an opposite phenomenon when he appears in the realistic
drama _Les Frères Karamazov_ as the horrific old father, Feodor, and
in _Twelfth Night_ as Aguecheek. These are absolutely contradictory
impersonations. In each case Jouvet completely disguises his own
personality. The interesting point is that the physical impersonation
which he brings to the Russian play is essentially unrealistic. It
is all very carefully designed in costume, make-up, and gesture as a
broad and striking expression, but not as a representation, of rough
dominance. The red face and the green coat mix in the olive-bronze hat.
His hair and his hat, his coat and his elbows flare out in lines of
almost comic violence. He is very close to caricature in a thoroughly
realistic play. Here is a curious mixture of methods and ends—planes
and categories cutting across one another and creating new figures.
Copeau’s Vieux-Colombier is to-day the most interesting forcing bed
of the new acting in Europe—unless the Kamerny Theater of the Russian
expressionists is nourishing more than scenery. Copeau’s theater, with
its naked stage and almost permanent architectural setting, its lack
of proscenium and footlights, and its steps and forestage leading
down to the audience, makes unquestionably for presentational acting.
The illusion of Realism and representation is extremely difficult
to attain. In four plays, _Les Frères Karamazov_, _Twelfth Night_,
_The S. S. Tenacity_, and _Le Carrosse du St.-Sacrement_, varied as
they are, we see no great amount of the sort of masquerading which
Jouvet does so well in the first two. In the main, the actors keep
their own normal appearance throughout; but they are not, of course,
playing types. To some extent, therefore, they are working in the
vein of Bernhardt and Grasso, striving for impersonation in emotion
rather than in physique. Except for a gouty foot and a simple change
in costume, Copeau’s Peruvian governor in the comedy _Le Carrosse du
St.-Sacrement_, and his impersonation of the intellectual brother of
the house of Karamazov are outwardly very much alike. It is in the mood
alone that he registers the difference. In both, but particularly in
the comic governor, there is a touch of the presentational attitude
which fills the rest of the company in varying degrees and informs most
of _Twelfth Night_. The difference between this acting and what we are
accustomed to, is particularly plain in a comparison of the English
sailor as played in the New York production of _The S. S. Tenacity_,
and in the Paris production—the oily reality of Claude Cooper’s
impersonation against the rather brash, certainly very dry version of
Robert Allard. Allard’s performance has the stamp of almost all the
acting at the Vieux-Colombier. It is something intellectually settled
upon as an expression of an emotion, and then conveyed to the audience
almost as if read and explained. In the school of Copeau, who was once
journalist and critic, there is ever something of the expounder. It is
a reading, an explanation, in the terms of a theatrical performance. It
is, to a certain degree, presentational, because in every reading, in
every explanation, there must be an awareness of the existence of the
audience.
CHAPTER IX
THE REINHARDT TRADITION
Plays of a new expressionist quality—profound, grave, ecstatic, and
as far from the neurotic as from the realistic—may be written in the
next few years without the stimulus of a great expressionist theater or
a great expressionist director. How they are going to get themselves
properly produced is another matter. They may be conceived out of the
spirit of the time, under the stimulus of the expressionist settings of
the scene designers; but the _accouchement_ will demand a rather expert
midwife.
Expressionist acting, on the contrary, will never achieve more than
a hint of existence without a director to call it forth. A Copeau
is necessary to bring out the freshness of the company of the
Vieux-Colombier, and the hints it gives of the new acting. A rather
extraordinary director will be needed to banish representational
acting, and to put in its place a presentational ensemble, and to fuse
it with the new play.
Is there such a man in Europe to-day? Is there already an indication of
his coming in the modifications that other men have wrought in acting,
in setting, and even in theater?
We may as well begin with Reinhardt. He has been the greatest man
of the theater of this century. He fled from his Berlin theaters in
1920, to find in Salzburg a retreat from disillusion and a place of
new beginnings. We found him there in the summer of 1922 preparing to
issue forth from the baroque beauty of the loveliest palace of this
lovely city to the conquest of America, and to an experiment in Vienna
which may make him again the one figure of the theater—the director we
seek. And here and there about Europe we came on spasmodic signs of
his continued activity—extraordinary plans for a _Festspielhaus_ in
Salzburg or in Geneva, and productions of _Orpheus in the Underworld_
and Strindberg’s _The Dream Play_ in Stockholm.
It would be better, perhaps, to call _Orpheus_ and _The Dream Play_
efficient pot-boilers, and to let them go at that. They give no true
measure of the man whose strength and vision grew from art-cabarets
to which Balieff owes the inspiration for his _Chauve-Souris_, and
naturalistic beginnings with Gorky and Wedekind, until he had assembled
the most striking company and repertory west of Moscow, and centered
about himself the whole theatrical movement which Craig and Appia
began. The Swedish productions are worth a moment’s attention only, for
they show some of Reinhardt’s faults, and hint at a virtue.
I write of _Orpheus_ alone, because the qualities of the Strindberg
drama were only to be guessed at from photographs and reports, all
uniting in dispraise. There were lovely things in this performance of
Offenbach’s operetta for which neither director nor composer could
claim credit—the light, clear, nightingale voices of the women of the
Swedish Opera, their superb figures, and the icy beauty of blue eyes
and ashen hair. But the things I remember from _Orpheus_ in which
Reinhardt had a share are often disappointing things, scenes slighted,
episodes badly lit, above all carelessness of detail. It has been
Reinhardt’s major fault, this failure to bring every feature of a
production to the highest point of perfection within his grasp. He has
always been satisfied to slight one part if the whole could be “put
over” by emphasis on another part. Those who remember _Sumurûn_ will
recall things in this brilliantly exciting pantomime that struck them
as impossibly slack—bad painting on the canvas flats, a bald contrast
between the flimsy front scenes and the solid structure of the court of
the harem behind.
In _Orpheus_ his negligence seems to have begun in the choice of a
designer. A Dane, Max Rée, makes a mess of the scene on Olympus, and
gets to nothing better elsewhere than a golden gate from a chapel in
Nancy set against a blue night; Cupid against a gray sky, and, for the
descent into Hades, white rays from out a great cloud, down one of
which the company dances against the velvet black of the back drop.
Before now, Reinhardt has let himself wander from his first instincts
and desires—which are usually the instincts of Ernst Stern, his
notable designer; there are the horrors of Poelzig’s decoration of the
Grosses Schauspielhaus to testify to this.
[Illustration:
The Cathedral Scene from _Faust_. A Reinhardt production of 1912,
designed by Ernst Stern. Two huge columns tower up against black
emptiness. Crimson light from the unseen altar at one side streams on
the congregation and throws quivering shadows of a cross on the nearer
column.
]
The three moments of _Orpheus_ which electrified Swedish audiences are
common enough in conception, but they have something of the simple
directness and smash which characterized Reinhardt’s earlier work. The
three episodes are closely linked and make the climax of the piece.
There again you can see Reinhardt’s method—the expenditure of so much
of his care and energy upon the most important action of the play. In
_Orpheus_ the place for such emphasis is the revolt on Mt. Olympus,
and the descent of Jupiter and the gods to Hades. Reinhardt begins
with the _carmagnole_ of the revolutionists, with their red banners
upon long poles rioting about in the light blue of the celestial
regions. For the beginning of the descent into Hades, Reinhardt sees
to it that there shall be a high point at the very back of the stage,
and from here, clear down to the footlights and over them on a runway
beside the boxes, he sends his gods and goddesses cakewalking two at
a time down into the depths of the orchestra pit. After a very brief
darkness, while the cloud and its rays of light are installed down
stage, Reinhardt sets the gods prancing down this white and black path
into the flaming silk mouth of hell. By recognizing an opportunity for
an effect at the crucial point of the piece, and concentrating upon it
whatever energies he has for _Orpheus_, he makes the descent of the
gods far more memorable than it can have been in any other production.
Yet it all seems a trivial and half-hearted effort for the man who made
Shakespeare so tremendously vital at the Deutsches Theater, and lifted
Sophocles’ _Œdipus_ into crashing popularity at the Circus Schumann.
In his day Reinhardt was all things to all men. He began with the great
naturalist director Brahm of the Freie Volksbühne. He made a _Night
Lodging_ of utter Realism. He put on _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ in a
forest of _papier-mâché_. He brought an austere symbolic quality to
_Hamlet_, closing the play with those tall, tall spears that shepherded
the body of the Dane upon its shield. He made the story of Sister
Beatrice into a gigantic and glorious spectacle in _The Miracle_. He
championed intimacy in the theater, took the actor out upon a runway
over the heads of the audience in _Sumurûn_ and finally, at the
Grosses Schauspielhaus, he put the spectators half around the players,
and thrust the players in among the spectators in the last scene of
Rolland’s _Danton_.
Instinct led him to the heart of plays, as it led him from Realism
and the proscenium frame back to the Greek orchestra and the actor as
a theatrical figure. He grasped the emotional heart of a drama with
almost unerring judgment, and he bent a tremendous energy to the task
of making the heart of the audience beat with it. Occasionally he
ignored or could not animate some secondary but important phase of
a play. In _The Merchant of Venice_, though he made Shylock rightly
the center of the play and built up a court scene of intolerable
excitement, his Portia and his Nerissa were tawdry figures. But his
successes were far greater and far more significant than his failures.
_Romeo and Juliet_ he made into a thing of youthful passion that was
almost too deep, too intimate for the eyes of strangers. _Hamlet_ with
Moissi was an experience of life itself, asserting again the emotional
quality of Reinhardt as against the esthetic quality of Craig.
It is hardly necessary to speak of the part that Reinhardt played in
establishing the vogue of the designer in the theater, of his attempt
to bring Craig to his stage, of his experiments with stage machinery
and lighting equipment, or of the extraordinary personal energy which
made so much work possible. The German theater testifies continually
to his influence. Dozens of younger men must be working in his vein
to-day. As far north as Gothenburg, the commercial city of Sweden, and
as far south as Vienna his influence spreads.
In Gothenburg works a young director, Per Lindberg, who is as patently
a disciple as he was once a student of Reinhardt. There in the
Lorensberg Theater is the revolving stage, with settings by a young
Swede, Knut Ström, which might have been seen at the Deutsches Theater
ten years ago. A large repertory brings forth scenery often in the
heavily simplified fashion of ten years ago, but sometimes fresh and
ambitious. _Romeo and Juliet_ appears against scenes like early Italian
paintings, with one permanent background of hill and cypresses and a
number of naïve arrangements of arched arcades from some Fra Angelico.
The artist turns _régisseur_ also in _Everyman_, and manages a
performance fresh in its arrangement of setting, platforms, and steps,
if a little reminiscent in costumes and poses and movements.
In Richard Weichert, of the State Schauspielhaus in Frankfort, you find
a _régisseur_ who suggests the influence of Reinhardt without losing
distinction as one of the three really significant directors of Germany
to-day. It is not so much an influence in an imitative sense, as a
resemblance in effectiveness along rather similar lines.
[Illustration:
_Maria Stuart_: the throne-room at Westminster. Tall screens of blue
and gold are ranged behind a dais surmounted by a high, pointed throne
of dull gold. At either side curtains of silvery blue. Queen Elizabeth
wears a gown of gleaming gold. A Weichert production in Frankfort
designed by Sievert.
]
Weichert, like so many of the outstanding directors of Germany,
has a single artist with whom he works on terms of the closest
coöperation—Ludwig Sievert. It is a little hard, therefore, to divide
the credit in _Maria Stuart_ for many of the dramatic effects of
people against settings and in light. You might put down the scenic
ideas wholly to Sievert, since Weichert has permitted the use of a
particularly poor setting for the scene of Queen Mary’s tirade against
Elizabeth; a setting which is a sloppy attempt at lyricism in keeping
with Mary’s speech at the beginning of the scene, but quite out of
touch with the dramatic end. If Weichert could dictate the fine
prison scene reproduced in this book, he would hardly allow Sievert to
include the greenery-yallery exterior to which I have taken exception.
On the other hand, can it be only an accidental use that Weichert
makes of the curtains in the throne room scene? The act begins with a
curious arrangement of square blue columns in an angle of which the
throne is set. When the audience is over, pages draw blue curtains from
each side of the proscenium diagonally backward to the columns by the
throne. This cuts down the room to terms of intimacy for the council
scene. The point at which Weichert must enter definitely as _régisseur_
comes when Elizabeth steps to one side of the room away from her group
of councilors to read some document; then the down-stage edge of the
curtain at the side by the councilors is drawn back far enough for a
flood of amber light to strike across in front of the men, and catch
the white figure of the queen. Here in this light she dominates the
room; and Leicester, when he steps into it for a scene with Mortimer,
does the same. It is a device of great use to the actor in building up
the power and atmosphere of the moment.
The dramatic vigor of Weichert never goes so high in _Maria Stuart_ as
Reinhardt’s, but he is never so careless of detail or of subordinate
scenes. Almost every inch of the play seems painstakingly perfected.
Not only are the actors who give so sloppy a performance in _Peer Gynt_
under another director, strung up constantly to their best effort;
but every detail, from contrasts in costuming and the arrangement of
costumed figures, to the motion of hands and bodies, seems calculated
to heighten the play’s emotion. Take the first scene, for example, the
prison in which Queen Mary is confined with her few retainers. The
drawing shows the interesting arrangement of the scene with bars to
indicate a prison but not to obstruct action. It pictures the final
scene in a later act, when the queen receives her friends and says
good-by before going to her death. The contrast of the queen in white
and the others in black is excellent. In the first act, even the queen
is in black; the only note of color, a deep red, is given to the heroic
boy, Mortimer, who is to bring something like hope to Mary. The long
scene between Mortimer and the queen is handled with great dignity, and
at the same time intensity. It is studied out to the last details. The
hands alone are worth all your attention.
Weichert’s direction passes on from atmosphere and movement to the
expression that the players themselves give of their characters. It is
here perhaps that the resemblance to Reinhardt is closest. You catch
it in many places: the contrast between Mortimer’s tense young fervor,
and the masterful, play-acting nonchalance of Leicester; this red and
green horror of an Elizabeth, looking somehow as bald beneath her wig
as history says she was, and bursting with pent energies and passions;
towards the end of the play, Leicester, the deliberate fop, leaning
against the wall like some wilted violet, Mortimer exhausted but still
strong beside him; then the death of the boy, the quick stabbing, and
the spears of the soldiers raying towards his body on the floor. It is
all sharp, firm, poised—and very, very careful.
[Illustration:
_Maria Stuart_: a room in the castle where Queen Mary is imprisoned.
High black grills fill the proscenium arch on either side. Behind,
a flat wall of silvery gray. The sketch shows the moment when Mary,
gowned and veiled in white, bids farewell to her attendants. A
Weichert production in Frankfort designed by Sievert.
]
This is the past of Reinhardt—continued into the present and the future
by other men. What of his own continuation of it? Some have thought him
finished. Fifteen, twenty years of such accomplishment in the theater
are likely to drain any man. And indeed Reinhardt does seem to have run
through his work in Berlin, and finished with it. No one will know just
how much was personal, how much professional, how much philosophic,
in the force that drove him to give up the leadership of his great
organization, and see it destroyed. The difficulties of management,
with increasing costs and actors lost to the movies, undoubtedly
weighed heavily. But it is certain that he felt the failure of his big,
pet venture, the Grosses Schauspielhaus. It was to have been the crown
of his efforts and beliefs—the “theater of the five thousand,” as he
had called it from the days when he astounded the world with _Œdipus_.
In structure and design it was badly handled; it proved a bastard thing
and won the severe condemnation of the critics. Added to this was a
desire, unquestionably, to shake loose, to get a fresh prospect on the
theater, to strike out again if possible towards a final, sure goal.
Germans spoke of Reinhardt as vacillating and uncertain in his first
years in Salzburg. But is anything but uncertainty to be expected when
a man has given up a long line of effort, and is seeking a new one? It
is a virtue then to be unsure, to be testing and trying the mind, to be
seeking some sort of truth and repeatedly rejecting error.
Certainty began to creep in with Reinhardt’s plan for a _Festspielhaus_
in Salzburg—a Grosses Schauspielhaus of simpler and more conservative
pattern built truer on a knowledge of the mistakes of the first. It
was to unite Reinhardt, Richard Strauss, the composer, and Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, the playwright. It reached some sort of tentative plan
at the hands of Poelzig, who mis-designed the Grosses Schauspielhaus,
and Adolf Linnebach, then passed on to Max Hasait, who laid out a stage
scheme for some new architect to build his plans around. This scheme
called for a semi-circular forestage, with a revolving stage in its
center, a traveling cyclorama of the Ars pattern behind this revolving
stage, a larger cyclorama taking in still a deeper stage, and another
and a larger cyclorama behind that. The proscenium was to be narrowed
or widened to suit the size of production and cyclorama. The house
itself was to be as adjustable, with a ceiling that let down in such
a way as to cut the seating capacity from three or four thousand to
fifteen hundred.
While this project waited on capital, an almost hopeless condition in
Austria, and hints began to come that the _Festspielhaus_ would have
to be built in Geneva instead, a new opportunity came to Reinhardt’s
hands through President Vetter, head of the Austrian State theaters,
an opportunity of working in a playhouse that agreed with much that
Reinhardt had felt about the relations of audience and actor. He was
invited to produce five or six plays in the fall of 1922 in the new
theater in the Redoutensaal in Vienna. Here, upon a stage practically
without setting, and within a room that holds actors and audience in a
matrix of baroque richness, Reinhardt will have produced, by the time
this book appears, the following plays: _Turandot_, Gozzi’s Italian
comedy, _Clavigor_ and _Stella_ by Goethe, Molière’s _Le Misanthrope_,
and _Dame Cobalt_ by Calderon. Here he will have to work in an
absolutely non-realistic vein, he will have to explore to the fullest
the possibilities of the new and curious sort of acting which I have
called presentational. This adventure in Maria Theresa’s ballroom will
measure Reinhardt against the future.
CHAPTER X
THE ARTIST AS DIRECTOR
The director of the future may not be a director of to-day. He may not
be a director at all. He may be one of those artists whose appearance
has been such a distinctive and interesting phenomenon of the twentieth
century theater. While we examine Max Reinhardt to discover if he is
likely to be the flux which will fuse the expressionist play and the
presentational actor, it may be that the man we seek is his former
designer of settings, Ernst Stern.
The relation of artist and director in the modern theater has been a
curious one, quite as intimate as that of pilot-fish and shark, and
not so dissimilar. Attached to the shark, the pilot-fish has his way
through life made easy and secure; he is carried comfortably from one
hunting ground to another. Often, however, when the time comes to find
food, it is the pilot-fish that seeks out the provender, and prepares
the ground, as it were, for the attack of the shark. Then they both
feast, and the pilot-fish resumes his subordinate position.
We may shift the figure to pleasanter ground by grace of Samuel
Butler, the Erewhonian. This brilliant, odd old gentleman, a bit of
a scientist as well as a literary man, had a passion for transferring
the terms and conceptions of biology to machinery and to man’s social
relationships. Departing from the crustaceans, which grow new legs or
tails as fast as the old are cut off, he said:
“What ... can be more distinct from a man than his banker or his
solicitor? Yet these are commonly so much parts of him that he can no
more cut them off and grow new ones than he can grow new legs or arms;
neither must he wound his solicitor; a wound in the solicitor is a
very serious thing. As for his bank,—failure of his bank’s action may
be as fatal to a man as failure of his heart.... We can, indeed, grow
butchers, bakers, and greengrocers, almost _ad libitum_, but these are
low developments and correspond to skin, hair, or finger nails.”
I do not know whether it would be right to say that directors have
grown artists with great assiduity in the past twenty years, or that
the greatest of the directors have become as closely associated with
particular artists as a well-to-do Englishman is with his banker or his
solicitor. At any rate the name of Reinhardt is intimately associated
with the name of Stern; Jessner has his Pirchan, Fehling his Strohbach;
I have spoken of the close relationship of Weichert and Sievert, and
I could point out similar identifications in America. An artist of a
certain type has come into a very definite, creative connection with
the art of production, and he has usually brought his contribution to
the theater of a particular director.
The designer is a modern product. He was unknown to Molière or
Shakespeare; the tailor was their only artist. Except for incidental
music, costume is the one field in which another talent than that of
actor or director invaded the theater from Greek days until the last
years of the seventeenth century. There were designers of scenery in
the Renaissance, but they kept to the court masques. Inigo Jones would
have been as astonished and as shocked as Shakespeare if anybody had
suggested that he try to work upon the stage of the Globe Theater. The
advent of Italian opera—a development easy to trace from the court
masques—and the building of elaborate theaters to house its scenery,
brought the painter upon the stage. The names of the flamboyant
brothers Galli-Bibiena are the first great names to be met with in the
annals of scene painting. And they were the last great names until
Schinkel, the German architect, began in the early nineteenth century
to seek a way of ridding the stage of the dull devices of the current
scene painters. Scenery was not an invention of Realism; it was a much
older thing. I doubt if any one more talented than a good carpenter or
an interior decorator was needed to achieve the actuality which the
realists demanded. When artists of distinction, or designers with a
flair for the theater appeared at the stage door, it was because they
saw Shakespeare or Goethe, von Hofmannsthal or Maeterlinck sending
in their cards to Irving or Reinhardt or Stanislavsky.
[Illustration:
The Desert: a setting by Isaac Grünewald from the opera, _Samson
and Delilah_. A vista of hills and sky, painted and lit in tones of
burning orange, is broken at either side by high, leaning walls of
harsh gray rock. The director, Harald André, has grouped his players
so as to continue the triangular form of the opening through which
they are seen. At the Royal Opera in Stockholm.
]
Now what are the relations that this modern phenomenon has established
with the theater through the medium of the director? Ordinarily
they differ very much from the attitude that existed between the
old-fashioned scenic artist and the director, and the attitude that
still exists in the case of most scenic studios. This is the relation
of shopkeeper and buyer. The director orders so many settings from the
studio. Perhaps he specifies that they are to be arranged in this or
that fashion, though usually, if the director hasn’t the intelligence
to employ a thoroughly creative designer, he hasn’t the interest to
care what the setting is like so long as it has enough doors and
windows to satisfy the dramatist. Occasionally you find a keen, modern
director who, for one reason or another, has to employ an artist of
inferior quality. Then it is the director’s ideas and conceptions and
even his rough sketches and plans that are executed, not the artist’s.
In Stockholm, for example, Harald André so dominates the official
scene painter of the Opera that the settings for _Macbeth_ are largely
André’s in design though they are Thorolf Jansson’s in execution. Even
in the case of the exceptionally talented artist, Isaac Grünewald,
with whom André associated himself for the production of _Samson and
Delilah_, the director’s ideas could dominate in certain scenes. For
example, in the beautiful and effective episode of the Jews in the
desert which André injected into the first act—a scene for which the
director required a symbolic picture of the fall of the walls of
Philistia to accompany the orchestral music which he used for this
interlude. The brilliance with which Grünewald executed the conception
may be judged from the accompanying illustration.
The commonest relationship of the director and the designer has
been coöperative. The artist has brought a scheme of production to
the director as often, perhaps, as the director has brought such a
scheme to the artist. The director has then criticized, revised, even
amplified the artist’s designs, and has brought them to realization on
the stage. And the artist and the director, arranging lights at the
final rehearsals, have come to a last coöperation which may be more
important to the play than any that has gone before.
[Illustration:
_Samson and Delilah_: the mill. A remarkable example of an essentially
ornamental theatrical setting, designed by Isaac Grünewald for the
Royal Opera in Stockholm. Black emptiness. A slanting shaft of light
strikes the millstone in a vivid crescent. As the wheel travels in
its track this crescent widens to a disk of blinding light, and then
shrinks again. The actual forms of this setting are sublimated into an
arresting composition of shifting abstract shapes of light.
]
You find, however, constant evidence of the artist running ahead of
the director in the creation of details of production which have a
large bearing on the action as well as on the atmosphere of the play.
Grünewald brought a setting to the mill scene in _Samson and Delilah_
which was not only strikingly original and dramatic, but which forced
the direction into a single course. The usual arrangement is the flat
millstone with a long pole, against which Samson pushes, treading
out a large circle as the stone revolves. The actor is always more
or less visible, and there is no particular impression of a cruel
machine dominating a human being. Grünewald changed all this by using
a primitive type of vertical millstone. The sketch shows the stage
in darkness except for one shaft of light striking sideways across.
The great wheel is set well down front within a low circular wall.
Along the wall Samson walks, pushing against a short pole that sticks
out from the center of one face of the high narrow, millstone. As he
pushes, the stone swings about and also revolves. This allows the beam
of light to catch first a thin crescent at the top of the curving edge
of the wheel, then a wider and wider curve, until suddenly, as Samson
comes into view, the light brings out the flat face of the wheel like
a full moon. Against this the actor is outlined for his _aria_. Then,
while the orchestra plays, he pushes the wheel once more around. This
arrangement is extraordinarily fine as a living picture and as an
expression of the mood of the scene. Moreover, it is a triumph for
the artist, because it is an idea in direction as well as setting. It
dictates the movement of the player and manages it in the best possible
way. No other action for Samson is possible in this set, and no other
action could be so appropriate and effective.
Examples of similar dictation by the artist—though none so
striking—come to mind. In Frankfort Sievert arranged the settings for
Strindberg’s _Towards Damascus_ in a way that contributed dramatic
significance to the movement of the players. The piece is in seventeen
scenes; it proceeds through eight different settings to reach the
ninth, a church, and from the ninth the hero passes back through the
eight in reverse order until he arrives at the spot where the action
began. Sievert saw an opportunity to use the revolving stage, as well
as elements of design, in a way interpreting and unifying the play. He
placed all nine scenes on the “revolver,” and he made the acting floor
of each successive setting a little higher than the last. This results
in rather narrow rooms and a sea shore bounded by formal yellow walls,
but it permits an obvious unity, it shows visually the path that the
hero has to follow, and it symbolizes his progress as a steady upward
movement towards the church.
The artist dictating a particular kind of direction is obvious enough
in _Chout (Le Bouffon)_, the fantastic comic ballet by Prokofieff which
Gontcharova designed for the Ballets Russes. Gontcharova’s settings
are not particularly good, but at least they have a definite and
individual character. They are expressionist after a fashion related
more or less to Cubism. They present Russian scenes in wildly distorted
perspective. Log houses and wooden fences shatter the backdrop in a war
of serried timbers. A table is painted on a wing, the top tipping up
at an alarming angle, one plate drawn securely upon it, and another,
of _papier-mâché_, pinned to it. All this sort of thing enjoined upon
the _régisseur_ a kind of direction quite as bizarre, mannered, and
comic. _Chout_ seems to have had no direction at all in any creative
sense. The _régisseur_ failed to meet the challenge of the artist.
[Illustration:
The first scene of Tchehoff’s _Uncle Vanya_. Here Pitoëff indicates
a Russian country side by a rustic bench and slender birch trees
formally spaced against a flat gray curtain.
]
It is ordinarily very hard to say what share the artist or the director
has had in the scheme of a setting, or whether the director has
bothered his head at all about the setting after confiding it to what
he considers competent hands. It is an interesting speculation just
how much the physical shape of Reinhardt’s productions has been the
sole creation of his artist, Stern. Certainly Stern delighted in the
problems which the use of the revolving stage presented, and only in a
single mind could the complexities of these sets, nesting together like
some cut-out puzzle, be organized to a definite end. It is entirely
possible that, except for a conference on the general tone of the
production, and criticisms of the scheme devised by Stern, Reinhardt
may have given no thought at all to the scenery. Stern was a master in
his own line, and for Reinhardt there was always the thing he delighted
most in, the emotional mood produced by the voices and movements of the
actors. His carelessness of detail even in the acting, suggests that
for him there were only the biggest moments, the important elements and
climaxes, that put over the emotion of the play.
Sometimes artist and director are the same, as with Pitoëff in Geneva
and Paris, or with Knut Ström in Gothenburg. In such a case setting,
direction, and acting are one. But ordinarily there is a division
of responsibility, and an opportunity for the artist to play a part
in the production of a drama far more important than Bibiena’s. Just
how important it may prove to be is bound up, I think, with the
future of the theater as a physical thing, and with the temperament
of the artist. Working as a designer of picture-settings, the artist
can only suggest action, but not dictate it, through the shapes and
atmospheres he creates. The important thing is that almost all the
designers of real distinction in Europe are tending steadily away
from the picture-setting. They are constantly at work upon plans for
breaking down the proscenium-frame type of production, and for reaching
a simple platform stage or podium upon which the actor shall present
himself frankly as an actor. This means, curiously enough, that the
designers of scenery are trying to eliminate scenery, to abolish their
vocation. And this in turn should indicate that the artist has his eye
on something else besides being an artist.
The director who works in such a new theater as the artists desire—in
the Redoutensaal in Vienna, for example,—requires an artist to work
with him who sees art in terms of the arrangement of action upon steps,
and against properties or screens. This is ordinarily the business of
the director in our picture-frame theater; with the work of the artist
enchantingly visible in the setting behind the actors, the director can
get away reasonably well with the esthetic problems of the relations
of actors and furniture and of actors and actors. Nobody notes his
shortcomings in this regard. Put him upon an almost naked stage, and
he must not only make his actors far more expressive in voice and
feature, but he must also do fine things with their bodies and their
meager surroundings. This is far easier for a pictorial artist than
for the director, who is usually an actor without a well-trained eye.
The director must therefore employ an artist even in the sceneryless
theater, and employ him to do what is really a work of direction. The
two must try to fuse their individualities and abilities, and bring out
a composite director-artist, a double man possessing the talents that
appear together in Pitoëff.
[Illustration:
A scene from Grabbe’s _Napoleon_. The Place de Grêve in Paris is
indicated by a great street lamp set boldly on a raised platform in
the center of the stage. A Jessner production designed by Cesar Klein.
]
The immediate question is obviously this: If the director cannot
acquire the talents of the artist, why cannot the artist acquire the
talents of the director? If the knack of visual design, and the keen
appreciation of physical relationships cannot be cultivated in a man
who does not possess them by birth, is it likewise impossible for the
man who possesses them to acquire the faculty of understanding and of
drawing forth emotion in the actor?
The problem narrows down to the temperament of the artist _versus_
the temperament of the director. There is a difference; it is no use
denying it. The director is ordinarily a man sensitive enough to
understand human emotion deeply and to be able to recognize it, summon
it, and guide it in actors. But he must also be callous enough to
meet the contacts of direction—often very difficult contacts—and to
organize not only the performance of the players, but also a great
deal of bothersome detail involving men and women who must be managed
and cajoled, commanded, and worn down, and generally treated as no
artist cares to treat others, or to treat himself in the process of
treating others. The director must be an executive, and this implies a
cold ability to dominate other human beings, which the artist does not
ordinarily have. The artist is essentially a lonely worker. He is not
gregarious in his labor.
So far as the future goes, the hope for the artist is that he will be
able to reverse the Butlerian process which held in the relations of
director and designer. He must be able to “grow a director.” This may
not be so very difficult. It may very well happen that an artist will
employ a stage manager, as an astute director now employs an artist, to
do a part of his work for him. He will explain to the stage manager the
general scheme of production that he wants, much as a director explains
to an artist the sort of settings he desires. The stage manager will
rehearse the movements of the actors towards this end. When the artist
sees opportunities for further development of action and business, he
will explain this to the stage manager, and perhaps to the players
involved, and the stage manager will again see that the ideas of his
superior are carried out. Something of the kind occurs even now where
a director employs a subdirector to “break in” the company. Both
Reinhardt and Arthur Hopkins, though thoroughly capable of “wading
into” a group of players, and enforcing action by minute direction and
imitation, generally use the quiet method of consulting with players,
and suggesting changes to them, not during the actual rehearsal, but
afterwards in the protection of a wing or the privacy of a dressing
room.
[Illustration:
The first scene from _Othello_ as staged by Leopold Jessner in Berlin.
On long curved steps which remain throughout, and against the neutral
background of the cyclorama, the artist, Emil Pirchan, puts the barest
indications of place. Here, Brabantio’s house gleams like a moonstone
against a background of neutral-tinted distance.
]
The presence of the artist as director in some future theater without
scenery, implies a decided influence on the type of acting.
Such a stage itself, thrust boldly at the spectators, if not actually
placed in the midst of them, tends to dictate a frank, direct contact
between players and audience. In such a house an actor will be all
but forced to desert the purely representational style of to-day, and
to present himself and his emotions in an open, assertive, masculine
manner as objects of art and of emotion.
The tendency of the artist towards this kind of theater implies, I
think, a tendency towards presentational acting. Certainly I have
talked with few who were not receptive to it.
Put together a stage that tends towards presentational acting and an
artist whose instincts run to the same ends, and the outcome is not
difficult to foresee.
The problem at present is, what artist? And where? And how soon?
CHAPTER XI
A NEW ADVENTURE IN DIRECTION
The outstanding director in the German theater to-day is also the most
radical director. And the most radical director is at the head of the
Prussian State Theater, the Schauspielhaus, in Berlin. His name is
Leopold Jessner, and he is the only man who has threatened to fill
the place made vacant by Reinhardt’s retirement. Some say that he has
already filled it, and—with disarming logic—that Reinhardt was only a
mountebank anyhow. Some think Jessner a clever eccentric. Certainly
he is the most discussed personality in the German theater, and his
methods are the most debated.
One word crops up whenever his name is mentioned—_Jessnertreppen_.
The German language has boiled down into a single word an idea that
we would have to phrase as “those crazy steps of Leopold Jessner.” It
makes a handy stone for the anti-Jessnerites to throw at the director’s
friends. Jessner’s friends are beginning to have the good sense to pick
up the stone and throw it back. For the word _Jessnertreppen_ hits off
a virtue—perhaps, the main virtue of the man.
[Illustration:
_Othello_: act III, scene 3. A towering column, with its lower end
sharpened like the point of a lead pencil, is seemingly driven into
one end of the central platform. Othello and Iago stand at the base.
IAGO: Have you not sometimes seen a handkerchief
Spotted with strawberries in your wife’s hands?
]
Jessner fills his stage with steps. He seems unable to get along
without them. He must have platforms, levels, walls, terraces. They
are to him what screens, towering shapes, great curtains are to Gordon
Craig. In every production Jessner, through his artist, Emil Pirchan,
provides some permanent foundation besides the stage-floor for the
actor to play upon, some arrangement of different levels. In his
_Richard III_ it is a wall all across the stage, with a platform along
the top at the base of another wall, and for certain scenes a flight
of steps like a pyramid placed against the lower wall. In _Othello_
Jessner uses two platforms, one on top of the other, each reached
by two or three steps, the lower a long ellipse almost as large as
the stage, the upper one smaller and proportionately broader; upon
the upper platform Jessner places certain indications of setting.
For Grabbe’s _Napoleon_ he uses four or five steps rising sharply
to a platform perhaps four feet high. Sometimes this platform is
supplemented by a high one pulled apart in the middle to make opposing
hills, redoubts, vantage points in the battle scenes.
The _Jessnertreppen_ are the key to the physical things in this
director’s productions. They give the stage one general shape for
each play. They establish a formal quality. They tend to banish
representation in scenery, since only indications of setting harmonize
with their frank artificiality. And—their main purpose—they provide
the director with most interesting opportunities for manœuvering his
actors.
One of the simplest and most obvious of these is a new way of making
entrances. Such steps as are used in _Othello_ and _Napoleon_ go down
at the back as far as they rise in the front, and below that the
director opens a trap or two in the floor. Thus he is able to have
an actor walk straight up out of the back of the stage, and appear
in a dominating position in the middle of the action. Jessner uses
this novel means of entrance again and again in _Othello_, and it is
always fresh and effective. For the return to Cyprus the Moor marches
triumphantly up these steps, to the welcome of his wife.
Far more important, however, is what Jessner does with the front of
the steps. They may be there to help a formal stage with very little
scenery to seem steadily interesting even to audiences that expect the
conventional gauds of the theater. But their true office is to make
possible a sort of three-dimensional direction for which Jessner has
become renowned. Ordinarily the actor moves in only two directions upon
the stage—right and left, and towards the footlights and away from
them. As a matter of fact, the latter movement is so unsatisfactory
from the point of view of any spectators except those in the balconies,
that the actor really has only one plane in which he can move visibly
and expressively. Jessner does more than add a third dimension when he
sends his actors up and down the steps. He also gives a great deal more
significance to the movement towards and away from the audience.
[Illustration:
_Othello_: act 4, scene 2. Cyprus. The castle. On the central platform
are set two curved screens of dull salmon pink. Behind, the quivering
darkness of the unlighted cyclorama. Emilia, dressed in deep crimson,
stands in the foreground.
]
Beside the sense of movement—always an intriguing thing in the
theater—Jessner provides in his steps a mechanism for solving many
dramatic problems. His actors do not spend their time getting out of
the way of the actors behind them. They are not shuttling back and
forth in an effort to let the audience see all the players at the same
time. One actor cannot “cover” another if he stands on steps. Even a
very large crowd can appear on such a stage without the individual
speakers being lost. As Lee Simonson showed in his use of different
levels for the Theater Guild’s production of _He Who Gets Slapped_,
with the proper sort of elevations on the stage a large number of
actors can play a very complicated scene without confusing their
relationships or assuming awkward positions.
But a great deal more important than this negative virtue is the
positive contribution of steps in permitting many more and much finer
compositions than the flat floor permits. Jessner composes freely in
three dimensions. He composes both for esthetic and for dramatic effect.
There are times when you can see him arranging his actors with nothing
but the esthetic aim in mind. Take the first scene in which Napoleon
himself appears in Grabbe’s drama. It is not a particularly good
setting in some ways; it is a rather obvious and ugly silhouette of
a bastion and a slanting parapet leading up to it. The scene shows
Napoleon receiving reports from an officer and giving orders. Jessner
deliberately places Napoleon on top of the bastion against the sky and
stands the officer stiffly on the parapet below; the relation of the
two men as characters in the play is thus established visually as well
as through the text. The relation of the two men as a composition—not
as characters—has to be disturbed by the entrance of a second officer.
It is obviously impossible for Napoleon and the first officer both
to retain their positions if the second officer is to fit into a
composition. Accordingly the first moves just enough to establish a new
esthetic relation embracing all three.
Jessner is free with his dramatic compositions and occasionally
altogether too obvious. He keeps his dominant people at the top of
the _Jessnertreppen_, or brings them down as they lose command. He
handles the accession of Richard III as Shakespeare did, and as very
few directors have since done. When the burghers come to ask Richard to
be king, they find him “aloft, between two bishops,” in compliance with
Buckingham’s advice: “Go, go up to the leads.” Jessner has Richard walk
upon the platform above the wall; it is his first appearance on high
and he maintains his place until the battle at the end. At the close of
_Napoleon_, the emperor, who has appeared hitherto only at the top of
the steps, is seen seated, broken and disconsolate, on the lowest step
of all, with a sinking sun behind him, and the soldiers above.
[Illustration:
_Othello_: act 4, scene 2. Iago lurks in the shadow of a great black
shape distorted like the trunk of some fantastic tree. Cassio pursues
Roderigo along a narrow path which skirts the base of the cyclorama;
you see their running figures, far away and small.
]
It would seem safe to infer from all this that Jessner is not a
realistic producer. He might, of course, have achieved many of these
effects within a natural setting, but only at the cost of a great
deal of laborious planning and manœuvering. As a matter of fact,
Jessner doesn’t use one ounce of energy trying to be either natural or
plausible. His method is openly expressionistic.
Jessner distorts the natural in a hundred ways to achieve something
expressive of the drama. The first scene in _Napoleon_, as he gives it,
is supposed according to the text to pass in the arcades of the Palais
Royal, lined with booths. Various episodes, dialogues, and harangues
take place between different speakers and different knots of the
crowd. The usual method of handling such a scene is to turn on and off
the speech of the different groups of actors at will, making certain
speakers and parts of the crowd obligingly inaudible to the audience.
There is little enough of nature in such a business, but Jessner
banishes even that. He keeps the stage empty except for small crowds
that rush out, along with the speakers or show-barkers, for particular
episodes.
Jessner handles crowds even more arbitrarily at times. Later in
_Napoleon_, during a riot preceding the news of Napoleon’s return from
exile, a revolutionist kills a tailor. As his body sinks to the steps,
the crowd of red-clothed men and women falls upon him, almost as if
to devour the corpse, and covers the steps as with a great blood-red
stain. In _Richard III_, when Gloucester appears as king in a red
cloak upon the top of the red steps, which are placed for this purpose
against the wall, his eight retainers, also in red, sink down in a heap
below him like a pile of bloody skulls. In _Othello_, when the Moor
returns in triumph to Cyprus a cheering crowd comes with him up the
steps from the back. When he has reached the top and can go no higher,
the crowd sinks prostrate. For a moment he seems to grow in stature,
and his triumph to tower upward.
[Illustration:
The prison scene from _Richard III_. A triangular patch of light
discloses a low arched opening in the nearer wall of the permanent
setting where Clarence sits in chains.
CLARENCE: Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels....
]
These are all compositions in three dimensions, as well as violations
of ordinary human conduct. Jessner can also create symbolic action out
of unnatural action without any particular aid from the steps. The
scene of Napoleon’s entrance into the throne room of Louis XVIII is
an interesting example. The steps give prominence to the throne, and
enable the audience to see better; but Jessner’s symbolism has nothing
to do with the steps. The scene is made up of some curtains masking
each side, two wings cut in rococo curves and ornamented with lilies in
rococo patterns. A flat backdrop of the same design and colors—not a
very good design or very French colors—completes the room. In this room
in an earlier scene Louis has held audience, a fat, yellow-and-white
egg of a man, like some Humpty-Dumpty caught in a flood of the fierce
white light that is supposed to beat about a throne, and all too
seldom does anything of the kind. But now Louis is gone, and the
lilies of the wall are shadowed by curtains of Napoleonic blue, which
have, for some unaccountable reason, got themselves hung in the room.
Napoleon enters through the gap in the curtains, reaches up, seizes the
edge of one of them, and pulls it down over the glory that was Bourbon.
Then he turns and faces the audience while two files of soldiers march
stiffly past him to the opposite side from which each entered. The
gesture to the curtains, and the _staccato_ march of the soldiers back
of Napoleon, set out the drama of his returning power.
Naturally Shakespeare, even more than Grabbe, gives Jessner exceptional
opportunities to symbolize and formalize in direction. He is quick to
seize them—particularly in the soliloquies. He begins _Richard III_
with Gloucester speaking to the audience as Prologue; he ends it with
Richmond as Epilogue. Jessner always flings asides directly at the
spectators. When he comes upon soliloquies—as in Brakenbury’s musings
after Clarence has fallen asleep in his cell—he cuts them off sharply
from the previous action by altering the lighting, and bringing the
actor down-stage to speak full at the audience. He places the murderers
squatting on the prompter’s box for much of their chatter. He has
the scrivener read Hastings’ condemnation to the audience from the
same vantage point, and upon this relic, in poses fashioned a little
after Rodin’s _Burghers of Calais_, he places the three citizens who
discourse of the old king’s death and the sorry state of the realm.
Jessner is quite as arbitrary in his handling of light as in his
handling of people. He does not use light merely to illumine the stage,
as directors did thirty years ago. He does not use light and shadow
merely to define action by making faces and figures more dynamic,
as Appia set modern producers doing. He uses light and shadow as a
parallel expression to the play. Light and shadow act the drama almost
as much as do the players. The light is not in the least “natural.” It
suits the mood of the scene. It waxes and wanes with the progress or
the action. When the little princes enter in _Richard III_ the light
shines out more brightly. When Othello dies, it grows dim, then a sharp
shaft of light shoots out from the prompter’s box, and throws the
shadow of Iago over the tragedy he has caused, and the shadow of the
great canopied bed spreads out over the cyclorama, which has stood as a
sort of limit of space about the play. Jessner is particularly fond of
shadows. When one rival meets another and vanquishes him, Jessner will
have him literally “throw him into the shade.” Spotlights, flashing on,
create meaningful shadows. An amusing example occurs in the soliloquy
of Richard ending:
Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass,
That I may see my shadow as I pass.
As Richard says this, the lights on the stage go down, and a
spotlight from the prompter’s box throws his humped shadow on the wall.
[Illustration:
_Richard III_: Gloucester and his shadow. A high green-gray wall
extends straight across the stage; in front, a lower wall. As
Gloucester speaks,
Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass,
That I may see my shadow as I pass,
a spotlight concealed in the prompter’s box is suddenly turned on and
his shadow looms up, huge and sinister.
]
Jessner has his players under unusual control, and he permits very
little of the accidental expression of feeling which Gordon Craig
inveighs against in the actor. He even forbids the little shiftings and
motions of the hands which are natural to anybody, actor or layman,
while listening to a long speech from another. Jessner’s actors,
if they are not speaking, and if their emotions are not being very
markedly played upon, are held motionless. They do not move a limb. I
have heard that, in a ball room scene, Jessner kept dozens of players
absolutely immobile in the poses of the dance while the two principals
talked.
Jessner’s company, as it appears in _Richard III_, _Napoleon_, and
_Othello_, displays no extraordinary talent. The director has instilled
a vitality as sharp as the silence and immobility which he frequently
demands; and they play with that drive and that sharpness of accent
which are inherently German. But there is no genius here, no Moissi.
Fritz Kortner, who plays Richard and Othello, is the outstanding
figure, but he seems a player of limited vision and not very great
technical range. He plays both parts on the same two notes: a soft,
precise, and almost whispering voice, and another that rasps and all
but squalls. Both are a little monotonous in tempo and accent. He uses
the voice of the dove a great deal in _Othello_, both to establish the
Moor’s kind and noble nature, and also as a base upon which to rear the
contrast of his anger. The dove is a serpent in _Richard_.
Physically, Kortner’s Richard is odd and striking. The actor is not
very tall, and he is decidedly thick in figure. His attitudes, the
apelike swing of his arms, his pudgy face, twisted by an evil grin,
give him an odd appearance that constantly suggests other images
than Richard himself. A humped toad, a fat, cross monkey, a grinning
Japanese mask, the mask of a Greek comedian—finally the truth strikes
home: it is the _Balzac_ of Rodin.
[Illustration:
_Richard III_: Gloucester becomes King. Robed in scarlet, he stands at
the head of a flight of blood-red steps. Below him, a double row of
kneeling, scarlet-clad courtiers. Behind, a high gray wall. Above, a
blood-red sky.
]
There is a moment in _Richard_ when this curious figure is forgotten.
It is the dream of the king the night before the battle of Bosworth
Field. (Why is it, by the way, that no producer seems to have the
genius and naïveté to produce this scene as Shakespeare wrote it, to
place the tents of Richard and of Richmond on either side of the stage,
and to let the ghosts bless Richmond and curse Richard alternately as
they do in the text?) Jessner shears away the blessings, and lets the
ghosts curse in the wings. Upon the slant of the blood-red steps lies
Richard sleeping. As the voices call, he writhes and twists upon his
uneasy couch. The voices rise and race, his agitation grows more and
more horrible, until at the end his humped body is beating a fearsome
tattoo to the rhythm of the cursing ghostly voices. Immediately
after this really effective and fine scene, comes the extraordinary,
much talked of and quite ludicrous end of Richard. He has his scene
with the generals, then goes off to battle—or is it merely to tear
off his coat of mail and his shirt? At any rate he is on the stage a
few moments later, staggering along the top of the wall, naked to the
waist. He cries: “A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” Then he
mounts his sword and, as if on a hobby horse, hops down the steps until
exhaustion overcomes him and he falls.
Perhaps this indicates the fault that at present keeps Jessner from
being a great director. His judgment and his taste—which mean the soul
with which he interprets and animates his work—are very, very faulty.
There is no austerity and almost no true beauty in his _Othello_, only
strength. There is no dignity in his _Richard III_, only horror. He has
made Richard terrible, but only with the terror of wormy graveyards.
There is nothing of 15th century England in it, none of the beauty and
flash of the time to make the hideousness of Gloucester the darker. The
play is drowned in black—dirty, mean black. Far worse, it is stripped
of the qualities that are Shakespeare. Worst of all, there is no shred
of poetry in the whole length of the production, unless it is the final
moment.
If you can forget the question of taste—if you do not care what
interpretation a man puts on a great work of art—you must admit
Jessner to a very high place as a director. He has originality,
ingenuity, bravery, an uncommon technical ability. He is industrious,
and indefatigably careful. His sins are not the sins of Reinhardt. No
detail escapes him; so small a thing as off-stage noise he handles with
the greatest skill. But Jessner is no poet.
With the question of taste goes also another fault, not so grave, yet
important and perhaps significant. Jessner appears to worship the
obvious, to believe that the theater is a place of A. B. C. impressions
and reactions. He is daring enough in his technique but not in his
ideas. He flings out symbols right and left, but they are the symbols
of the primer. He directs in words of one syllable. _Richard III_ is
an explanation in black and white, which occasionally ventures to
lisp in white and red. Richard begins the play in black against a
black curtain, speaking the soliloquy of “Now is the winter of our
discontent.” Richmond ends it in white against a white curtain with his
speech to Stanley and his soldiers converted into a soliloquy to the
audience. The troops of Richard are red-clothed figures crossing the
red steps. The troops of Richmond cross it in white. This is symbolism
in baby-talk, presentational production in kindergarten terms. It is
not impossible that an audience is up to more than that.
[Illustration:
_Richard III_: on the blood-red steps of Richard’s coronation stands
Richmond, a white-robed general at the head of an army all in white.
]
It may be, of course, that Jessner is feeling his way and that
to-morrow he will venture upon subtlety—if it is in him. At any
rate, here is a presentational director, a man who forswears
resemblance and the picture frame, and who sets actors and their
movements, the setting and its lights, talking directly to the
audience. This is an advance in the methods of production which makes
the new movement of twenty years ago look like an afternoon stroll, a
revolt which makes that much-hailed revolution seem a pleasant little
excursion. It is an advance and a revolt, however, still looking for a
leader.
CHAPTER XII
MASSE-MENSCH—MOB-MAN
Prophecy is a risky business in the theater, especially when prophecy
concerns itself with personalities rather than tendencies. I find it
very difficult to bring myself to say that the man who will become
the leader of the new forces in the Continental theater is Jürgen
Fehling, director of _Masse-Mensch_. And yet—on the basis of a single
production—the temptation to believe something of the kind is strong
indeed.
Fehling’s work is closely associated with two striking phenomena. One
is the Volksbühne, the workingman’s theatrical organization of Berlin,
which maintains the handsomest and best devised theater in the German
capital; and the other is the play which has been given there with such
uncommon success, _Masse-Mensch_, a strange and powerful tragedy of the
“social revolution of the twentieth century” written by a communist
leader, Ernst Toller.
[Illustration:
The first moment of Jessner’s _Richard III_. Gloucester, a grotesque,
twisted figure in black, stands silhouetted against a black curtain.
In contrast to this Richmond speaks the final lines of the play
dressed in white against a white curtain.
GLOUCESTER: Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer....
Between these two extremes of black on black and white on white the
play takes its course.
]
The Berlin Volksbühne is interesting enough in itself. As the
only organization that has been able to produce successfully this
expressionist tragedy of communism, its power and position seem
highly significant. This society of proletarian playgoers was founded
more than thirty years ago as a sprouting bed for naturalistic drama
and the social thesis-play. To-day it still cultivates the best in
Realism and in the social drama, but it looks condescendingly on the
thesis-play, and it gives the most completely artistic and successful
example to be seen in Germany of an expressionist play and an
expressionist production.
The Volksbühne has always had a double policy—that of buying out
performances of good plays and retailing the seats to its members for
much less than the box office prices, and that of producing plays
itself. It began with a few Sunday performances of both kinds, and
steadily grew in membership to the point where it buys all the Sunday
matinees at a number of theaters, has two playhouses of its own, the
Volksbühne and the Neues Volkstheater, and is organizing an opera
house, the Volksoper. One hundred and eighty thousand men and women
of the lower and lower-middle classes subscribed in 1922 for eight
productions, either at the society’s theaters or at the playhouses with
which it deals.
The Volksbühne itself is rather an extraordinary theater. Its striking
front, with the words _Die Kunst dem Volke_ upon its pediment, rises
across a street that cuts through the workingmen’s quarter of Berlin,
and, after a slight bend, crosses the Spree and becomes Unter den
Linden. From above its little triangle of park, the Volksbühne stares
ironically and, doubtless, a little proudly down the long street that
passes the hideous art galleries of the Prussian government, the
palaces once occupied by the Hohenzollerns, the State Opera, where
royalty turned its back upon Richard Strauss, and runs on to the
Brandenburger Tor of Imperial memories. The theater has the grimly
noble air of the best of German architecture. In its auditorium Oskar
Kaufmann has turned from the austerity of gray stone to the richness
of red mahogany. The working class audiences of the Volksbühne find
themselves seated, therefore, in the handsomest and doubtless the most
costly auditorium of Berlin when they come to see the play which might
almost be the story of their own defeat in the communist risings of
1919.
_Masse-Mensch_ itself is a play, half dream and half reality, in which
is pictured the conflict of _Masse_, the masses, against _Mensch_,
the individual, of violent revolution against passive strike. Its
drama pleads piteously for the sacredness of human life and the equal
guilt of the State or the revolution that takes it. Because it was
written by Ernst Toller, who, as he wrote it, lay in a Munich jail
serving a twenty-year sentence for his part as Minister of Justice
in the red rebellion which followed the assassination of Kurt Eisner
by the reactionaries, _Masse-Mensch_ is pretty generally taboo in
German theaters. In the first six months after its _première_ at the
Volksbühne (29th September, 1921) it was played about seventy times,
a very great number of performances in repertory. But upon its
production in Nuremberg riots interrupted the first performance, and it
was never repeated.
[Illustration:
_Richard III_: the final moment. White virtue triumphs.
RICHMOND: Now civil wounds are stopp’d, Peace lives again:
That she may long live here, God say Amen!
]
To the significance of the play itself and the proletarian organization
which flings it in the face of a Germany where monarchists and
republicans, socialists and communists, State and cabals, murder with
almost equal recklessness, must be added a truly remarkable type and
quality of production. It bears a certain relation to the work of
Jessner at the State Schauspielhaus, where, by the way, Fehling is now
to be employed. It is absolutely free of Realism and representation—as
all expressionist production must be. It reduces setting to less than
symbol, to what is hardly more than a convenient platform for the
actor. It uses light arbitrarily.
_Masse-Mensch_ is a piece in seven scenes. The first, third, fifth and
seventh are actual; the others are dream-pictures. In the first scene
Toller’s stage directions call for “The rear room of a workingman’s
meeting hall. On the white-washed walls, portraits of leaders of the
people and photographs of union delegates. In the center a heavy table,
at which a woman and two workmen are seated.” The stage directions for
the second scene, or first dream-picture, read: “Indicated: The hall of
a stock exchange. At the desk, a clerk; about him, bankers and brokers.”
The playwright felt keenly the possibilities of the modern,
subjective methods of productions, or he would not have used the word,
“indicated.” He did not feel them clearly enough, however, to risk more
than their application to the dream-pictures. But, taking “Indicated”
as a key-word, Fehling has boldly ventured to apply abstract and
expressionist methods to the whole of this thoroughly expressionist
play. In the first scene, for instance, as you see it at the
Volksbühne, there is no hall, there is no desk, there are no portraits.
There is nothing but a deep box of high black curtains, and in the
center a very low, broad platform. Upon this platform, spotted out
with three shafts of light, are the two men and the woman in the taut
attitudes of wrestlers as they clasp hands, the woman in the middle.
For the dream scene, the stage is again in black curtains, but those at
the rear are occasionally opened to show a clerk on an impossibly high
stool, writing on an impossibly high desk, almost in silhouette against
the yellow-lighted dome. A few steps lead down into the darkness of the
front stage. Fehling and his stage designer, Hans Strohbach, pursue the
same general method in the succeeding scenes. The “real” episodes are
set in black curtains and with steps of one sort or another; they are
lit by obvious beams of light, and they are given no more color than
shows in the woman’s severe blue dress and one glimpse of the yellow
dome. The dream-pictures are more elaborately staged, though they seem
quite bare by the standard of our productions. The curious part is
that the scenes of reality are more expressionistic, considering
their purpose, than the dream-pictures. Reality is made of nothing but
abstract plastic shapes, harsh, and harshly lit. Dreamland is sometimes
painted and shaped in the slightly decorative spirit of Expressionism,
and it is lit with beauty and atmosphere.
[Illustration:
_Masse-Mensch_: dream-picture. A courtyard. Towering dark walls lean
inward; a green night sky; guards with lanterns seated on the floor at
either side. A man stands in the center playing a concertina.
]
The effective arrangement of Strohbach’s scenes, and the powerful use
which Fehling makes of them stamp the physical side of this production
with distinction. Spiritually it is even more distinguished because of
the rightness of vision with which Fehling interprets the play, and the
brilliance with which he handles, not only the individual acting, but
a chorus of united voices, which speaks through many scenes with an
extraordinary clarity and emotion.
From the beginning of the first scene the actors strike the note of
intensity and conviction, both as players and as characters, which
they are to carry through the whole performance. Mary Dietrich, once
of Reinhardt’s company, plays superbly the woman protagonist of the
strike and of humanity. From the moment when her husband comes to her
in the name of love to ask her to give up the leadership of the strike,
which will begin next day, Dietrich drives with such furious precision
at the meaning of this woman that she stands out immediately as a sort
of Christ-figure. In the beginning she must give up all; she must
leave home and love, to follow her call. In the end she must go to the
scaffold rejecting all means of escape. It is one of the distinctions
of this play, as well as of Dietrich’s playing, that this reference to
Christ is so beautiful and so sure, yet so reticent.
The second scene, the dream-picture of a stock exchange, is a
foreboding and dread satire. The bankers and brokers bid up human souls
in the war that is under way, and make plans for an international
corporation, which, posing as a founder of homes for convalescent
soldiers, will open brothels for the troops. The woman appears in
her dream, and makes a vain appeal to the humanity of these men. The
bankers hear only the announcement of a mine accident and plan a
benefit dance, beginning with a fox-trot by the brokers around the
stage.
The third scene is the labor meeting at which a decision is to be taken
on action to stop the making of munitions and end the war. Here again,
Fehling throws the author’s realistic stage directions overboard (much,
be it said, to the author’s pleasure). Instead of a hall, there is
again blackness, emptiness. Out of the emptiness speaks a marvelous
choral voice, the voice of the masses, measured, vibrant, intense:
Wir ewig eingekeilt
In Schluchten steiler Häuser.
Wir preisgegeben
Der Mechanik höhnischer Systeme.
Wir antlitzlos in Nacht der Tränen.
Wir ewig losgelöst von Müttern,
Aus Tiefen der Fabriken rufen wir:
Wann werden Liebe wir leben?
Wann werden Werk wir wirken?
Wann wird Erlösung uns?
[Illustration:
_Masse-Mensch_: the revolutionists’ meeting. On a broad flight of
steps rising steeply from the footlights, men and women are grouped in
an irregular lozenge, arbitrarily lit by sharp beams of light from the
top and sides of the proscenium arch. A Fehling production designed by
Strohbach.
]
Nothing like this voice, coming out of a darkness in which faces
vaguely begin to hover, has been imagined, much less attempted, in our
theater. The lights rise—or it would be more accurate to say, shoot
down—upon the men and women workers standing in an irregular lozenge
shape upon steep steps, which spread to the curtains at each side. Out
of this crowd, in chorus and singly, come pleas for action, and visions
of suffering which sweep the audience with emotion. The woman cries for
a strike against war and against capital. Behind her rises The Nameless
One, the bastard of War, to cry for armed revolt. His passion sweeps
the masses, and the woman submits.
The fourth scene, another dream-picture, envisages her fears for the
course of the revolution, her intuition that it will only breed a
new violence, the violence of the proletariat. Below great, crooked,
towering walls, guards hang over green lanterns. They sing ribald
songs of their miseries. The Nameless One enters, and, standing in
the middle, plays wildly on a concertina, while the guards and the
condemned dance the dance of death about him. The sky lights up on a
sudden in crimson, then pulses in and out; colors flood down over the
moving figures in waves that throb with the music. Among the condemned
is the husband of the woman. She tries to save him, as she would save
all men from violence. Her pleas are useless. She stands with him
before the firing squad as the curtain falls.
The fifth scene, the tremendous scene of the play and the production,
is the rally at the workers’ headquarters in the face of defeat. The
stage is again boxed in black. There are steps like the corner of
a pyramid rising up to the right of the audience. Upon these steps
gather the working people. You see a host, affrighted and cowering,
in the twenty-four men and women who stagger upon the steps singing
_The Marseillaise_. As they sway, locked together hand in hand,
like men on a sinking ship, and the old song mounts up against the
distant rattle of machine guns, the scene brings the cold sweat of
desperate excitement to the audience that fills the Volksbühne, and to
comfortable, purse-proud Americans as much as to men who have fought in
the streets of Berlin. Suddenly there is a louder rattle of arms. The
noise sweeps through the air. It drives into the souls of the huddling
men and women. They collapse, go down, fall in a tangled heap. The
curtains at the left loop up suddenly. There in the gap against the
yellow sky stand the soldiers. They arrest the woman, the woman whom
the rebels were about to condemn for her opposition to their slaughter.
[Illustration:
_Masse-Mensch_: the rallying. A pyramid of steps slanting to the right
of the stage. At its apex, a group of tense revolutionists sing _The
Marseillaise_, the woman-heroine opposite them in the center. Suddenly
machine-guns attack the meeting.
]
The sixth scene is a dream-picture of the woman in prison. There is a
void, a misty, swimming emptiness. Upon a platform is the woman’s
cell, a scarlet cage in which she can only kneel. About her stand
guards, bankers, the ghosts of dead enemies. They accuse her. She
answers. At last, out of the void rise the shapes of the masses, the
imprisoned masses who have been betrayed by violence and by the woman
who deserted them and cast her lot with violence. They move in a great
circle of towering shadows that seem to hang in the emptiness of the
sky, as they pass across the dome at the back of the stage. The guilt
of the masses, the guilt of the individual, the guilt of the woman—they
have filled the air with recrimination. The figures of the imprisoned
masses stop suddenly in their round. They raise their arms. They cry:
“We accuse!”
There is only the final scene left. It is in her cell. Again the black
curtains; some narrow steps. The husband comes to bring her freedom.
The Nameless One also, with a plan of escape through murdering the
guards. She rejects both. She rejects the priest, accusing men of
primeval sin. She goes to her death. And as she goes, two women
prisoners sneak out into the light—to divide the clothes of this new
Christ.
_Schuldig!_ Guilty! Guilty! The word echoes through the play, echoes
in the auditorium of the Volksbühne. All are guilty. All are sick with
guilt. And none more than these sufferers in the slums of Berlin who
must go to the theater to see in black curtains the picture of their
guilt. The world goes through capitalism, debasing itself, driving
terror, greed, cruelty into the place of love and understanding.
It comes out in revolution, a corruption of the thing it cures.
The Germans have been through capitalism with a vengeance, through
materialism, through war, and through a revolution that blasted
half the people and did not satisfy the rest. Here is the misery
of capitalism, the misery of abortive revolution, the misery of
defeat and black hunger. Berlin is in purgatory. And Berlin goes to
_Masse-Mensch_. Before this play sit hundreds of quite ordinary men,
who have only to hear some word shouted at them with the passion of
this play, and they will leave the slow and loved routine of homes, and
lie again behind sandbags on Unter den Linden. All this is a strange,
terrible, and sweet thing to feel as you sit looking at the purgatory
of those black curtains.
Toller and Fehling have made possible the realization of this intense
situation between play and audience; Toller by writing straight at the
heart of his public. His dialogue makes no pretense to the accidental
rhythms of life. It speaks out plainly and simply and beautifully the
passion of each character, the passions of the world. Fehling has
driven Toller’s speeches just as directly at the public. He has made
no pretense at actuality. He has put his actors forward as actors on
an abstract stage; and you think of them only as living, intimate
presences.
[Illustration:
_Masse-Mensch_: the machine-guns. The black curtains at the back are
thrown open. Soldiers and officers are seen enveloped in a thin haze
of smoke. The group shrinks back and falls together.
]
Comparison between Fehling and Jessner is inevitable. They are both
working upon the newest problem of production, the problem of escaping
from Realism to reality and to the theater. They both throw overboard
every shred of actuality that stands in the way of inner emotional
truth. Technically, Fehling is as insistent as Jessner on the abstract,
the formal production as the means of giving the actor and his emotion
vividly and completely to the audience. Fehling realizes as keenly as
Jessner does how different playing-levels can help him in deploying
and emphasizing his actors. He does not, like Jessner, use the same
levels throughout a play. He creates new plastics as he needs them. His
production is formal in principle, but he does not rely upon a stage
of certain permanent forms. His lighting is abstract, like Jessner’s,
paying no attention at all to actuality; but it is not so free or so
wilful in changes. The lights make a definite pattern in each scene and
stick to it throughout. The only sharp exception is the scene of the
dance of the condemned. Fehling does not try to make his lighting a
running gloss to the words of the play.
Fehling may be much over-praised by the emotion of _Masse-Mensch_;
perhaps there is a something in the passion of the play which lights up
these players and these playgoers of the Volksbühne, and brings forth
a unique and unwilled emotion. But there seem to be certain qualities
in this production which stamp the director as a man of imagination
and power. Certainly Fehling has a large and healthful simpleness. He
isn’t finicking over rudimentary explanations with lights and shadows
and primary colors. He isn’t missing the quality of the play in an
endeavor to create a thing of a single startling or novel tone. He is
certainly winning from his actors a spiritual coöperation finer than
any that we saw in Germany. He is unmistakably one of the leaders along
new paths—a sure and challenging force.
[Illustration:
_Masse-Mensch_: A woman dressed in blue in a dream-prison of twisted
scarlet bars, surrounded by motionless dark figures. Behind, gigantic
spectral shadow-shapes march across a faintly luminous void.
]
CHAPTER XIII
“THE THEATER OF THE FIVE THOUSAND”
Over some fifteen years a growing number of minds have been more or
less actively seeking a way towards a new type of theater. They have
been abusing the picture-frame stage, stamping on the footlights,
pulling out the front of the apron, pushing the actors into the loges,
down the orchestra pit, onto the prompter’s box, out upon runways or
up the aisles. They have even gone clear out of the playhouse and into
circuses, open air theaters, and public parks. All to set up a new and
mutual relationship between the actor and the audience.
You might almost say to set up any mutual relationship at all; for the
players of the peep-hole theater of Realism, the picture-frame theater,
the fourth wall theater, can hardly be said to have anything resembling
a relationship to the spectator. The thing peeped at can’t be aware
of the peeper. A picture does not know that it has an audience. Walls
may have ears, but the fourth wall has no eyes. It is the essence of
Realism and of realistic acting that they have their justification in
the thing they resemble, not in the people who may or may not be able
to recognize the resemblance. A perfect realistic performance is a
thing so close to life that it cannot permit itself to be aware of even
its own existence. Its perfection is so much more related to the thing
it imitates than to the audience which looks at it, that it would be no
less perfect if there were no one at all to look. The fourth wall _is_
a fourth wall. It might just as well be as real as the other three.
Alexander Bakshy wrote of Stanislavsky’s company: “It would have made
scarcely an atom of difference to the adequacy and completeness of the
Art Theater’s performance if the audience had been entirely removed.”
Such performances can be very interesting in their way, extraordinarily
interesting, in fact, when such players as Stanislavsky’s bring
spiritual distinction to their Realism. But there is another sort
of thing that can be interesting, too. Some think it can be more
interesting; at any rate they want to find out what it was that kept
the theater contented for the twenty-five centuries before it knew
Realism. They want to draw out the actor and the spectator; the actor
out of the picture frame and the spectator—if the actor is good
enough—out of his seat. They want to make the actor an actor once more.
And they think that a new sort of theater—or a very old sort—might have
something to do with it.
Directors have thought about it, and playwrights, dancing teachers,
architects, scenic artists, actors, and critics. Max Reinhardt put a
runway over the audience in _Sumurûn_ more than a dozen years ago and
staged Sophocles in a circus. Percy MacKaye developed the community
masque as a new form of outdoor theatrical performance through _The
Masque of St. Louis_ and _Caliban_, and brought it indoors with _The
Evergreen Tree_ and _The Will of Song_. Jaques-Dalcroze, deviser of the
eurythmic system of dance-education, created in Hellerau-bei-Dresden,
before the war, a hall holding the stage and the spectators within
translucent walls lit by ten thousand lights, and there, with the aid
of Adolphe Appia, he gave Paul Claudel’s drama _L’Annonce faite à
Marie_. Frank Lloyd Wright, designing a theater for Aline Barnsdall of
Los Angeles, created a model showing an adjustable proscenium, which
was hardly a proscenium, a domed stage which curved into the lines
of the auditorium, and a permanent architectural setting consisting
of a wall twelve feet high running across the stage. Herman Rosse,
the scenic artist, took to sketching theaters with all manner of odd
forestages and portals. Norman-Bel Geddes threw off in 1914 a plan
for a theater with stage and audience housed under a single dome, and
in 1921 designed a magnificent project for the production of Dante’s
_The Divine Comedy_ in Madison Square Garden in a permanent setting of
ringed steps, towering plinths, and light. Gémier, the French actor,
introduced the Reinhardt circus-theater to Paris. Jacques Copeau left
his reviewing of plays to create in the Vieux-Colombier a theater
without a proscenium, and with a forestage and a permanent setting,
in order to give his troupe of actors a fresh and truly theatrical
relation to their audience.
The first attempts to escape from the realistic theater were
Gargantuan. It seems as if there were something so essentially small
about our theater that a huge thing was the natural alternative. Max
Reinhardt and Percy MacKaye, the two men who began the break with
the realistic theater, and who carried their conceptions furthest,
plunged immediately to the huge, the magnificent. They could have found
inspiration in Gordon Craig, as practically every innovator in our
playhouse has done. For Gordon Craig, too, saw a gigantic vision of the
break between this peepshow of ours and the next theater:
“I see a great building to seat many thousands of people. At one end
rises a platform of heroic size on which figures of a heroic mold shall
move. The scene shall be such as the world shows us, not as our own
particular little street shows us. The movements of these scenes shall
be noble and great: all shall be illuminated by a light such as the
spheres give us, not such as the footlights give us, but such as we
dream of.”
MacKaye had a family tradition to urge him towards large experiments.
His father, Steele MacKaye, irritated no doubt by the limitations of
the nineteenth century theater as we are irritated by the limitations
of the theater of the twentieth century, conceived and all but launched
a grandiose and extraordinary scheme for a playhouse at the Chicago
World’s Fair. The Spectatorium, which was to seat ten thousand people
and give a spectacle of music and drama, movement and light, dancing
and action, on land and on water, was burned, however, before it could
be completed.
The dominating idea in the younger MacKaye was to create a dramatic
form of and for the people. It was to celebrate the works of humanity;
_The Masque of St. Louis_ commemorated the founding of the western
city, and _Caliban_ the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death. The
MacKaye masque was to be acted and danced by the community with the
assistance of a few trained players, and it was to be seen by as many
as possible; in St. Louis 7,000 took part and 200,000 looked on. The
experience of these community masques led MacKaye to want the active
participation of the citizens as audience as well as of the citizens as
actors, and in _The Evergreen Tree_ he arranged a Christmas festival,
to be given either out of doors or within, in which the spectators sang
with the chorus and the actors, who passed through the midst of them.
Another desire of MacKaye’s was the enlarging of the characters of his
masques to gigantic size. He did this literally in _The Masque of St.
Louis_ with the huge figure which stood for Cahokia. In _The Will of
Song_, given its first production indoors, he began to work upon the
idea of the “group being,” a single dramatic entity visualized through
a mass of players.
Whether or not Reinhardt began his first great circus-production,
Sophocles’ _Œdipus Rex_, with an esthetic philosophy, he had one
before he was finished with _Orestes_, Hauptmann’s _Festspiel_, and
_Everyman_, the productions which followed. This was visible in his
works as well as in the outgivings of his _Blätter des Deutschen
Theaters_.
Like MacKaye, Reinhardt found a tremendous fascination in the
relationship of this sort of production to man in the mass. In the
“theater of the five thousand,” as he called it, audiences are no
longer audiences. They are the people. “Their emotions are simple and
primitive, but great and powerful, as becomes the eternal human race.”
This follows from the nature of the theater and the relation of the
actors to the audience. Monumentality is the key note of such great
spaces. It is only the strongest and deepest feelings—the eternal
elements—that can move these great gatherings. The small and the petty
disappear.
Yet the emotion is direct and poignant, according to Reinhardt, because
of a spiritual intimacy established by the new relation of actors and
audience. In the Circus Schumann in Berlin Reinhardt revived the Greek
orchestra. At one end of the building was the front of a temple. The
actors came out in great mobs before the temple, upon an acting floor
surrounded on three sides by banks of spectators. In the theory and
the practice of Reinhardt there should be no curtain to conceal the
setting. When the spectator enters he finds himself in the midst of
great spaces, confronted by the whole scene, and himself a part of it.
When he is seated and the play begins he finds that “the chorus rises
and moves in the midst of the audience; the characters meet each other
amid the spectators; from all sides the hearer is being impressed, so
that gradually he becomes part of the whole, and is rapidly absorbed
in the action, a member of the chorus, so to speak.” This is a point
that Reinhardt has always stressed in his big productions. This desire
to make the spectators feel themselves participants is the same desire
that MacKaye has carried to the point of actually making them so.
Reinhardt stressed the importance of the actors being made one with the
audience through appearing in their midst. This maintained the intimacy
which, he felt, was the most valuable contribution of the realistic
movement in the theater—an intimacy produced in the main by the small
auditoriums required if conversational acting were to be audible.
Gigantic conceptions and tremendous emotional emphasis could thus be
brought home to the spectator.
Technically the circus-theater made interesting demands. From the
_régisseur_ and the scene designer it required the utmost simplicity.
Only the biggest and severest forms could be used. Light was the
main source of decoration; it emphasized the important and hid the
unessential. Acting, too, underwent the same test. The player had to
develop a simple and tremendous power. He had to dominate by intensity
and by dignity, by the vital and the great. There had to be music in
him, as there had to be music in the action itself.
The war prevented Reinhardt from continuing his experiments in
mass-production, and bringing them to fruition in a theater built
especially for the purpose. With the coming of peace he was able
to remodel and re-open the old Circus Schumann as the Grosses
Schauspielhaus. But in less than two years Reinhardt had left it in
discouragement, his great dream shattered. By the summer of 1922 it
could definitely be stamped an artistic failure—crowded to the doors
every night.
[Illustration:
An impression of the Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin. In the center
rises the great dome, dimly lit. At the left of the picture the
looming shadow of the hood above the forestage. A shaft of light from
the dome strikes across the space to the figure of Judith, standing
lonely and brave. Beyond, row after row of faces just visible in the
darkness.
]
It is not easy to trace the cause of failure, but it seems to lie in
the curious fact that here Reinhardt was both careless and too careful.
Physically the theater was wrong, if the theory was right, and its
physical mistakes can be traced to Reinhardt. He was too careful in
planning it and not courageous enough. Because he feared for its future
as a financial undertaking, he seems to have compromised it in form,
in order that it could be used as an ordinary, though huge playhouse
if it failed as a new kind of theater. He put in the Greek orchestra
surrounded on three sides by spectators. He made the floor flexible in
its levels, and led it up by adjustable platforms to a stage at one
side of the house. This much was right enough. But then he made
the thing a compromise between the Greek theater, a circus, and the
modern playhouse, by slapping a proscenium arch into the side wall and
installing behind it a huge stage with all the mechanical folderols of
the day—great dome, cloud-machine, revolving stage. It was beyond human
nature to resist the temptation of playing with the whole gigantic toy.
Neither Reinhardt nor the directors who succeeded him could be content,
as they should have been, to lower the curtain across the proscenium,
to plaster up the fourth wall. Perhaps there were not enough great
dramas like _Œdipus_ to draw for months the gigantic audiences needed
to support the venture; but this only meant that such a theater must be
maintained for festival performances, not that it must be filled with
bastard productions requiring a picture stage and largely inaudible
across the spaces of the Grosses Schauspielhaus.
Reinhardt was as careless in his selection of an architect as he
was careful in compromise. His original conception of the place was
excellent. He wanted it primitive and grand. He wanted it to soar. And
he thought of early Gothic. Between the pillars that had to be there to
support the roof of the old circus, he wanted a dark blue background, a
background of emptiness. The dome over the middle was to vanish into a
deep presence, lit sometimes by dim stars. Some one got to Reinhardt,
and persuaded him that he must be “modern;” he must assume a leadership
in architecture; he must give a chance to the greatest of the new
architects, Hans Poelzig. Reinhardt consented. And Poelzig produced a
very strange affair.
Some of the mistakes of the Grosses Schauspielhaus may be laid to the
old building. The banks of seats are rather close against the roof,
while the middle of the house is bridged by a gigantic dome. These
conditions might have been minimized by giving the low portion lines
that seemed to mount, and perhaps by closing in a large part of the
dome or darkening it. Instead Poelzig has made the dome the only
lovely and aspiring part of the architecture. It is a dream of soaring
circles. If the building could only be turned upside down, and the
actors could play in this flashing bowl, while the audience looked down
upon them—!
The whole house, its innumerable corridors, its foyers and promenades,
the walls of the auditorium, the ceiling, the capitals of the columns
that support the dome, the dome itself—every inch of the whole is
dominated by a single decorative _motif_, a very shoddy, cheap
_motif_. This is a pendant, stalactite arch, borrowed from the Moorish
architecture of Spain, and reduced to the lowest terms of mechanical
rudeness. The theater is of concrete and stucco, and this dull shape
is repeated endlessly and tediously, as if it had been scalloped out
by a machine. Only in the dome, or when it is no more than hinted
at in certain wall surfaces, does this shape do anything but bore
and depress. On top of this, Poelzig had stained the walls of many
corridors and rooms in a yawping red, and turned the main foyer into a
ghastly sea-green cavern. The theater is nervous, horrific, clangorous,
glowering. There is nothing fountain-like. No spirit wells up in
beauty. There is no dignity and no glory.
The fault may not be Poelzig’s, but the lighting of the stage and
orchestra seems unfortunately handled. Some of the lights for the inner
stage are placed in front of the arch of the proscenium instead of
behind it, and thus they illuminate it, and emphasize something that
ought not to be there at all, let alone pointed out. The lights for
the orchestra originally came wholly from the lower edge of the dome.
It was necessary, however, to supply more, and they have been placed
in an ugly red hood, which sticks out from the proscenium with no
relation to the rest of the house. The lights in the dome stab with a
glorious brilliance; the great beams seem to descend unendingly before
they reach the tiny figures of the actors, and spot them out of the
darkness. But these lights make the first mistake of trying to hide
themselves, and the second mistake of not succeeding in doing so. How
much better it would be if they were treated frankly as part of the
theater; if their source were admitted; if these lamps were hung in
great formal chandeliers made a part of the decorative design of the
production. For Romain Rolland’s _Danton_ the astute Ernst Stern hung
huge lanterns over the scene of the revolutionary tribunal; it was a
method that should have been perpetuated.
The productions that Reinhardt made are no longer to be seen in the
Grosses Schauspielhaus, for repertory vanished from his theaters along
with Reinhardt. You hear, however, of many interesting and beautiful
things in _Danton_, in _Œdipus_, in _Hamlet_, in _Julius Cæsar_, in
Hauptmann’s _Florian Geyer_. But you see no such things now, or at
least we did not see them when we were in Berlin. We saw the orchestra
filled with seats—perhaps to swell the meager seating capacity of three
thousand which was all Poelzig could include after he had wasted front
space on rows of boxes and wide-spaced chairs, and perhaps because the
new directors feared to use that glorious and terrible playing floor.
We saw the forestage shrunk to a platform jutting out perhaps twenty
feet. We saw a tedious performance of _Die Versunkene Glocke_, with the
action shoved into the realistic proscenium, with the scenic artist
fooling about with sloppily expressionist forms, and with the mountain
spirit hopping down the hillside with a resounding wooden thump. We saw
Hebbel’s _Judith_ done with much more effectiveness, though without
real daring or vision.
[Illustration:
The Inner Stage of the Grosses Schauspielhaus as set for the gates of
Holofernes’ palace. Designed by Ernst Schütte.
]
_Judith_, however, shows some of the possibilities of such a theater.
The beginning strikes in on the imagination with the impact of the
shaft of light that beats down on Holofernes, sitting like some idol
on his throne. Though he is almost back to the curtain line, instead
of out in the midst of the people, he drives home the effect of
seeing life in the round which such a theater can give. Here is talking
sculpture. The costumer, as well as the actor, is given a new problem:
the problem of clothes and the body that, like a statue, must mean
something from every angle, must have beauty and significance from
the back as much as from the front. The costume of Holofernes, at
least, achieved this. The actor has another problem, the problem of a
different movement and a different speech, movement slower and grander,
or else long and swift, speech that is more sonorous, more elaborately
spaced. The actor’s part—in spite of rather second-rate players—is
the part best done at the Grosses Schauspielhaus. There is a natural
aptitude in the German player for the grand, slow speech, the roaring
tempest. It is like the aptitude of the German people for the grand
slow play. They like drive, rather than speed. They want to hear dull
sonorous platitudes driven out by sheer belly-muscle.
There is one thing very beautiful in _Judith_ and in this theater. It
is the way a player can come forward to the edge of the forestage,
and stand there alone, stabbed at by a great white light, surrounded
first by emptiness, and beyond that by crowds, a brave figure alone
in a great dim space. That is something you cannot feel in the chummy
confines of a picture-frame.
The Grosses Schauspielhaus is a gigantic failure if you look at it
with vision—and also a great portent. The place is ugly, and its
purpose now debased, yet it hints at how beautiful a great, formal
theater could be, how moving and inspiring its drama. Even in the
wreckage, the idea still lives.
And if you try to bring a little of that same vision to the spectacle
of the man who made this failure, and who ran away, you cannot deny an
admiration for the courage to give up, to admit defeat, and then to go
to the church, and to try to do there, in the sanctified birthplace of
the modern theater, something to lift the spirit as high as the theater
of the five thousand was to have lifted it.
CHAPTER XIV
THE THEATER OF THE THREE HUNDRED
Size is no mania with the French. They do not insist on buildings that
are taller than those of any other nation, an empire that is larger,
ambitions and dreams mightier and more terrible. So perhaps it was
only natural that when a Frenchman wanted to present actors in a new
relationship to their audience, he should choose for his theater a
little hall in the Street of the Old Dovecot instead of a circus or a
park.
Doubtless there were many reasons why Jacques Copeau’s theater had to
be small. A potent one may have been economy, a thing that accounts for
the little theater movement far more than any theories of intimacy. The
question of repertory also may have had weight. There are many sizes
of drama, and there are special repertories for special theaters; but
many more plays are possible for a theater of five hundred seats than
for a theater of five thousand. _The Trojan Women_ can be played to one
hundred and twenty-nine people in the Toy Theater of Boston, as Maurice
Browne proved; but _Le Misanthrope_ is impossible in the Yale Bowl.
Copeau’s theater had to be small, not only because he had little money
and a great love of all sorts of plays, but also because—and this
counted more than even the French liking for the moderate and the
exact—the thing he was interested in was the actor and not a grandiose
idea. He ended by creating the first presentational playhouse in the
modern world, by maintaining for a long time the most radical, and by
achieving after some years the most successful. But he began by looking
for some place for his actors to act. They were to be a company of
fresh, sensitive, intelligent spirits bringing an intense and honest
art to those who might care for it. Copeau had found his actors in all
manner of places besides the routine theaters. He had talked to them
about everything but make-up, curtain calls, and how to be natural on
the stage. He had played with them and worked with them in the country,
rehearsing the first pieces of the repertory in a barn. He did not
intend to dump them down into one of the ordinary theaters of Paris.
Copeau proposed to take the hall that his resources permitted, and to
make it over to suit the spirit of his company. He could build no ideal
theater, but he could make one in which his actors would escape the
realisms and the pretenses of the modern theater, and would play to and
with the audience as their spirit demanded.
And so we have the Théâter du Vieux-Colombier. It is not at all like
the hideous theater-hall that was there before. It is not quite as
it was when Copeau closed his first season before the war. It is
not in the least like the Garrick Theater, which he remade in New
York in 1917; as a matter of fact it is not so good. It is not very
charming in its shape or its decorations, and Copeau is as careless as
Reinhardt about things like good painting and clean walls. But this
Vieux-Colombier is a distinguished and a jolly place all the same, the
happiest and the healthiest theater west of Vienna.
It is hard to know where to begin a description of this curious
playhouse. Suppose you had never been to the Vieux-Colombier, but
suppose you knew that this was a theater without the illusion of
Realism, and suppose you sought for the thing that would tell you this
the quickest. What would you see? Probably the steps that lead from
the stage to the forestage, and even from the forestage to the seats
of the audience. There are no footlights, and so you have the pleasure
of seeing the square, firm edge where the stage floor ends. This edge
bends into a large curve in the middle, with three curved steps below,
and it angles out at the sides to where smaller steps join those of the
middle on an ample forestage. These steps and the edge of the stage
do more than any one thing in the theater to signal that you are not
looking into a picture-frame. Even when they are not used, as in _Les
Frères Karamazov_, these steps keep you warily alive to that fact.
When you examine the theater more closely you discover that there is
no proscenium. The nearest thing to it is the last of the arches which
hold up the roof of the auditorium. There is a curtain, to be sure, but
it does not fall behind pillars, and it does not cover the forestage.
It descends at that point where the walls of the auditorium become the
walls of the stage, and it merely serves to hide one end of this long
room while the stage hands make small changes in the permanent setting.
The permanent setting, like the theater itself, is an experimental
product of the attempt to provide what the actors need. It is really
no more than a balcony placed against the back wall, with an arched
opening in the middle, and with walls at the sides that let the actors,
who have gone out through the arch, get off stage unseen. This balcony
is so solidly built that it cannot be taken out, but certain portions
are alterable. The changes in setting are managed by changing the
width of the arch or the line of the top of the balcony, by adding
doors, steps at one side, or railings, and particularly by placing
significant properties or screens upon the stage. Louis Jouvet, stage
director as well as Copeau’s best actor, has done many ingenious things
to make his settings varied enough and characteristic enough without
losing the permanent thing that is common to them all, and that aids in
banishing realistic illusion. A detail that shows the working of his
mind is to be found in the screens that he uses to create a room in
_Les Frères Karamazov_; by giving them two or three inches of thickness
and a certain amount of molding, he has escaped the impression of
the bare, the unsubstantial, and the untheatrical which the screens of
other designers produce.
[Illustration:
_Les Frères Karamazov_: the Gypsy Inn. This sketch and the following
one show the permanent skeleton-setting of Copeau’s Théâtre du
Vieux-Colombier in Paris. Here, in an arrangement of paneled screens
Louis Jouvet has caught the mood of the scene without reference to
details of “atmosphere.”
]
The balcony is a most useful feature. It was not accident that put
a balcony in the Elizabethan theater or made the Greeks use the
theologium. It serves a practical purpose, of course, in any scheme of
permanent setting, for it makes it unnecessary to build balconies for
scenes that especially call for them. A good deal more important to the
director is the movement up and down, as well as sideways and back and
forth, which it gives him. With the forestage, the main stage, and the
balcony, Copeau has almost as useful a base for composing action in
three dimensions as Jessner has in the steps which he uses in various
productions in Berlin.
Sheldon Cheney has called Copeau’s stage a “naked stage.” It is a happy
accident of language that, when you call it a concrete stage, you
describe the material of which it is made and the feeling of sharp,
definite statement which resides in everything done upon it. The wall
at the right of the audience is solid, the wall at the back, too; the
ceiling of the stage has some openings between steel girders, but it is
more like the floor than the “flies” of the average theater. Only in
the left wall of the stage are there any openings. Through these the
actors manage to exit into the next building. The floor of the stage,
except at the edges, is even more adamant. It will not yield to pleas
for atmosphere, illusion or any of the gewgaws of our theater. It is
solid concrete. Copeau wanted to give the actor’s feet a sense of
support which they cannot get from yielding and resounding wood. At the
sides is a small section in timber which permits the use of a stairway
to a lower room as in _The S. S. Tenacity_ or _Les Frères Karamazov_.
In the forestage are two other openings, covered by wooden and concrete
slabs.
Jouvet’s lighting system is ingenious and philosophically sound, if not
altogether perfect. Practically all the light comes from four large
lamps hung in the auditorium. They replace footlights, borderlights,
and floods from the sides. Illumination from the auditorium itself
is essential to good stage lighting; the footlights are an unhappy
makeshift. David Belasco very wisely uses a battery of lamps hidden
in the face of the first balcony. In German theaters, the huge
6000-candlepower bulbs developed since the war, tempt directors to
inefficient and distracting lighting from the ventilator above the
main chandelier in the roof of the auditorium. Neither the latter
method nor Belasco’s is wholly satisfactory in a theater that forswears
representation, a theater like the Grosses Schauspielhaus or the
Vieux-Colombier or the Redoutensaal in Vienna. Electric light on the
stage begins as an imitation of the real. If a table is illuminated
by a large light in the first border, there must be a lamp above the
table in such a position as to suggest that it is doing all the work.
The next step is to use light for illumination and composition—for
beauty, in fact—without bothering to try to make it seem to come from
some natural source in the setting. When such light comes from the
auditorium we may get composition, but we also get a throw-back to
the source of the light itself. The ray carries our eye up to some
lens-lamp trying unsuccessfully to hide in the bottom of the dome
of the Grosses Schauspielhaus, or in the top of the ceiling of the
Burgtheater. A new problem arises. It should be answered by making
the source frankly visible. The hoods themselves of large bulbs have
a shape that would make them interesting and not without significance
in the Grosses Schauspielhaus; or a new shape could be supplied to
harmonize with architecture or setting. In the Redoutensaal we find
glorious old crystal chandeliers lighting the stage—an accidental
result of the fact that the Viennese government converted Maria
Theresa’s ballroom into a playhouse. In the Vieux-Colombier Jouvet
makes no bones about admitting where his light is coming from. He
places the bulbs in octagonal lanterns, which, by revolving on an axis,
present different colored sides for the light to pass through; the
lanterns may also be moved in such directions as to throw the light
upon any desired part of the stage. These lanterns are frankly visible;
and, though they are not a pleasing shape, they fit esthetically with
the theory of this theater. Here is electric lighting presented at
last as the thing it really is, not as an imitation of something else.
The greatest faults of the Vieux-Colombier over which Copeau had
control, and which he could easily have avoided, lie in the color and
quality of painting on the stage. The concrete and the cream of the
auditorium take warm lights; but in portions of the stage itself,
Copeau has used a cold gray that is surely unfortunate. Much that you
see is shoddy. If the paint chips off a corner, nobody bothers to
replace it. Rivet heads and structural iron show when they have no
relation to the shapes on the stage. Now it is a good thing not to
spend too much energy on the physical side of the theater, but there is
a difference between austerity and slovenliness.
Actual productions, animated by the actors and graced with some of
Jouvet’s scenic arrangements, do a great deal to make the stage wholly
attractive. _The S. S. Tenacity_, a realistic play with a French café
for its setting, makes interesting demands on this non-realistic
stage. The demands are met, and met successfully. There is a counter
at one side with racks for bottles, a wooden door in the arch at
the back, a table in the center, and above it—the mark of Realism—a
shaded lamp, from which a great deal of the stage light comes. With
the actors giving us the sense of French life which was missing in
the New York and Viennese productions, we have here a performance
which might almost be enclosed in a proscenium frame. But there is in
the acting, as in the setting, much that is non-realistic, much that
seems representational only by contrast with the dominating spirit and
physique of the theater and its people.
In the playlet that goes with _The S. S. Tenacity_, Mérimée’s
_Le Carrosse du St.-Sacrement_, we are back in a piece from the
romantic period, a comedy of clear and artificial vigor. A screen
and some hangings with a southern flash to them set the stage for
eighteenth-century Peru. Copeau himself has the same Punch-like visage
that he presents to you in his own study, but now he manages to make
you think him a Spanish puppet, an exasperated and wily doll. The same
Punch appears in _Les Frères Karamazov_, but a Punch of the intellect,
a tragic marionette dangling on the strings of rationalism. At the end,
when Ivan goes mad, you may see most clearly the subtle exaggeration
which is at the heart of the acting of Copeau’s company. The whirling
body, the legs that beat a crazy tattoo on the floor, the twisting head
and the boggling eyes, are none of them copied from a candidate for the
asylum. They are all an explanation of what sort of lines in the figure
of a crazy man would strike the imagination, what angles and movements
would most sharply indicate lunacy.
_Karamazov_ is effectively composed on this stage by a few draperies
for the first scene, a line of curtains hiding the whole stage and
begging the question in the second scene, a flight of steps for the
hall of the Karamazovs, and two heavy screens for the inn. There is
nothing so fine as the interminable steps that lead up from the balcony
at the Garrick to the wretched room of Smerdiakov; but there is enough
improvement in the very excellent acting seen in New York, to make
up for this. Jouvet’s father is gigantically good; set beside his
Aguecheek, it puts this young man among the most interesting actors of
Europe. Paul Œttly, as the eldest brother, plays the striking scene in
the inn of the gypsies with uncommon vigor, and the stage direction
sweeps the scene along to a burning climax. The intensity of the actors
in this play, added to the intensity of the play itself, demonstrates
how completely a formal theater of this kind, and a type of acting
which is a reasoned sort of explanation, rather than a thing of life or
of acting, can stand up beside the Realism of our directors when it is
at its best.
[Illustration:
_La Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement at the Vieux-Colombier_: another
arrangement of Copeau’s permanent setting.
]
In _Twelfth Night_ you find the company clear out of the shackles of
realistic or semi-realistic plays, and happy in the beautiful playhouse
of fantasy. And here the quality of exposition—which you may trace
back to Copeau’s profession of critic, and forward through the days
given to the reading and study and analysis of each new play—has almost
altogether disappeared. The playing is spontaneous, or it is nothing.
Suzanne Bing’s Viola is a-quiver with radiance and wonder. Jean Le
Goff’s Orsino is no such God-favored performance, but his eyes
are lit with an ecstasy of love-sickness. The comedians are far from
Englishmen; but their creations are immensely funny: Jouvet’s gently
gawking Aguecheek, Romain Bouquet’s shaven-headed, almost Oriental Sir
Toby, Robert Allard’s extraordinary clown, the finest either of us had
ever seen. It is interesting, for once, to see Malvolio put in his
place as a character, and not given the star’s spotlight to preen in;
it might be a more satisfactory arrangement if Albert Savry could be
funnier in his dry Puritanism.
_Twelfth Night_ triumphs at the Vieux-Colombier by virtue of the spirit
of the actors, and the vision of the director. The costuming is bad—an
unsuccessful attempt to make Illyria, as it might well be, a land of no
time or place but Poetry; and the setting is no more than bright and
freakish in a Greenwich Village way. But in the costumes and up and
down the setting these players frisk, weaving patterns of beauty and
fun that link them into the true spirit of the play. The curtain is
there at convenient times to make the forestage into a neutral zone for
duke or sea captain, and between this forestage and the balconied space
behind there is room for all of Shakespeare’s play to race along just
as he wrote it. With the trap door in the forestage to act as cellar,
Malvolio can be incarcerated below-stairs and happily out of sight—much
as Shakespeare intended.
Copeau is a believer in gymnastics. (He is also a believer in
improvisation, a school of playwrights, and other things whose absence
makes him grow impatient with his theater). Through months and years of
strenuous labor, he is training half a dozen young people of his own
school to have bodies that are as well under control as a gymnast’s.
The performances of the Vieux-Colombier draw on players not so well
trained, but they show what physical command can accomplish. Here you
see acting that makes you think again of sculpture and its relation to
the new theater.
Copeau’s people can meet the test which the theater with a Greek
orchestra, like the Grosses Schauspielhaus, exacts. They can play “in
the round.” Their bodies can be seen from all sides, and still keep
expressiveness and beauty. They have learned to master their bodies, as
well as their voices, and they are able to make the lines of arms and
torsos and knees speak directly to the audience. When Jouvet sharply
underlines and almost caricatures the salient shape of old Karamazov he
is able to escape from ordinary representation, which may or may not
make its point, and he is able to push his conception of the wicked,
vital old man into almost direct physical contact with the audience. I
have often wondered when the actor would learn the lesson of sculpture.
There were centuries of almost literal representation, with the inner
expression of the artist and the artist’s sense of Form struggling
furiously to impose itself upon Reality, and failing more often than
succeeding. Then, with Rodin came the sense that sculpture could make
representation a distinctly secondary matter. There could be expression
first, and resemblance afterwards, if at all. Idea, which is one sort
of Form, enters the clay with Stanislas Szukalsky. Expression and idea,
poised in the human body, begin to inform acting directly and openly in
the company of the Vieux-Colombier. The first presentational theater
adds the medium of the body to the medium of the voice.
CHAPTER XV
THE REDOUTENSAAL—A PLAYHOUSE OF PERMANENCE
In Vienna on Christmas Day, 1921, there were no matches in the
match-stands of the cafés and no paper in the hotel writing rooms. Some
of the well-to-do and the recklessly soft-hearted had begun to feel
that they could afford to keep pet dogs again; but there were no silk
stockings on those most un-Teuton ankles that paraded the Burgring. You
may guess, therefore, that there was no butter on the tables of the
middle classes, and no milk in the houses of those who, by a curious
clairvoyance of language, are called the working people.
Two nights later three or four hundred citizens, with bits of bread and
meat wrapped in paper and stowed in their pockets, could be seen seated
in a great and splendid ballroom of Maria Theresa’s palace, under
the light of crystal chandeliers and the glow of priceless Gobelins,
watching the first performance, _The Marriage of Figaro_, in a theater
a stride ahead of any in Europe.
They had paid good money at one of the doors of that extraordinary old
building, the Hofburg, which rambles from the Opera to the Burgtheater
half across the shopping district of Vienna. After they had parted from
two or three thousand crowns apiece, they had wound up stone stairways
between white walls and twists of old ironwork, passed through
cloakrooms where princesses once left their wraps, and a supper room
where artists may cheerfully go mad over molding, pediment and mirror,
and reached at last the Theater in dem Redoutensaal. They found one of
the handsomest baroque rooms in Europe holding within its beauty both a
stage and an auditorium. A row of Gobelin tapestries filled the lower
reaches of the walls. Above were moldings and pilasters, cornices and
pargeting, spandrels and pediments, fillets and panelling, an ordered
richness of ornament that held suspended in its gray and golden haze
mirrors that echoed beauty, and chandeliers radiant with light. At one
end of the room, beneath great doors and a balcony which the architect
had planned in 1744, was a new structure; it broke the line of the
Gobelins, but continued the panelling, freshened to cream and gold, in
a curving wall across a platform and in double stairs leading to the
balcony. With man’s unfailing instinct for the essence of life, the
audience promptly identified this roofless shell as a stage. There was
a platform, of course, but there was no proscenium. There were doors
and windows in the curving wall, but no woodwings, borders, flats, or
backdrops. There was even a something along the front of the platform
which might conceal footlights, but there was nothing to be seen that
looked more like scenery than a row of screens.
Such is the room in which the forces of the Austrian State Opera House
have been giving _The Marriage of Figaro_ and _The Barber of Seville_,
and in which Reinhardt began late in 1922 the most interesting
experiment of his most experimental life—the presentation of plays
under a unique condition of theatrical intimacy between actor and
audience.
It is an odd spectacle, this of Vienna, the bankrupt, going
lightheartedly out on the most advanced experiment in production yet
attempted in Europe. One of its oddest angles is that the man who made
an empress’s ballroom over into a theater is a socialist—President
Vetter of the Staatstheaterverwaltung, the bureau under the republic
which controls the State playhouses. The conversion was not an easy
matter. Opponents rose up inside the State theaters and outside them.
Vienna was engaged for months upon one of those artistic quarrels from
which it is always drawing new health and spirit.
[Illustration:
The Redoutensaal in Vienna as arranged for the first scene of _The
Marriage of Figaro_. The room called for in the text is indicated by
a row of crimson screens set straight across the stage and pierced in
the center by a door. In the scheme of production indicated by this
unique environment such a mere indication is sufficient to establish
setting and mood.
]
When President Vetter had won his point he plunged briskly ahead at the
work of making over the ballroom into a very special kind of theater
without marring its beauty. Part of the old balcony came out, mirrors
replaced doors and windows down the sides of the hall, and Oberbaurat
Sebastien Heinrich set to work on the problem of creating a permanent
architectural setting for the stage which should harmonize with the
lovely room, yet stand out from it significantly enough to center
attention on the acting space. Meantime President Vetter took another
look at the Gobelins which had satisfied Maria Theresa, and decided
that they weren’t quite good enough; others had to be found. Even now
he is a little doubtful about those on the right hand wall.
The work of the Oberbaurat is admirable. He has continued the molding
above the Gobelins, and made it the top of the curving wall which is
the background for the stage. This shell is broken at each side by
a casement, which holds either a door or a window, and two masked
openings. Through one of these, close to the front of the stage, a
curtain the height of the wall is run out to hide changes in the
screens and furniture upon the stage. At the back, where the shell
curves close to the old balcony of the ballroom, the State architect
has placed a pair of graceful steps, which meet at the top, and
provide, underneath, an exit to the rear. For lighting, there are the
foots in their unobtrusive trough, and small floods placed in the gap
where the curtain moves; but by far the larger part of the illumination
comes from the seven chandeliers in the ceiling of the hall. The
chandeliers towards the rear are sometimes turned half down or even
off, but essentially it is the same light which illumines both players
and audience.
This light and the formal and permanent character of the stage stamp
the Redoutensaal with a character as old as it is fresh. This theater
goes beyond Copeau’s Vieux-Colombier in the attempt to re-establish in
our century that active relationship between actor and spectator which
existed in the great theaters of other centuries, and towards which
the finest minds of the theater have been striving. Here is a stage
freed from all the associations of modern stage-setting, innocent of
machinery or illusions, essentially theatrical. Actors must be actors
upon its boards. They cannot try to represent actual people; they can
only present themselves to the audience as artists who will give them a
vision of reality.
This is comparatively easy in opera. There is no realistic illusion
about a valet who sings a soliloquy on his master’s more intimate
habits. People who quarrel in verse to a merry tune are most unlikely
to be mistaken for the neighbors next door. With music and the stage
of the Redoutensaal to aid them, the singers of the State Opera manage
to give a roughly presentational performance. In direction there is
nothing notable to be seen, unless it is the wedding scene of _Figaro_
with the Count striding up and down across the front of the stage,
opposed in figure and in action to the plaguing women above upon the
stairs. The acting possibilities of this stage, however, are very
great. Reinhardt saw them vividly in the summer of 1922, while he was
making preparations for his five productions in September: _Turandot_
by Gozzi, _Stella_ and _Clavigor_ by Goethe, _Le Misanthrope_ by
Molière, and _Dame Cobalt_ by Calderon. He saw the possibilities and
the difficulties of acting also, and he rejoiced that he was to have
old and tried associates like Moissi, Pallenberg and Krauss with him
once more when he began his experiment with a theater far more exacting
than the Grosses Schauspielhaus, and a technique of acting very hard to
regain after so many years of Realism.
So far as there must be indications of time and place upon this stage,
a beginning in experiment has been made. It has not been a particularly
good beginning, but it shows the opportunities for the artist, and also
the limitations. They are very nearly identical. It is the business of
the scene designer who works here to draw from the Redoutensaal itself
the _motifs_ and colors which he shall add to the permanent setting. It
is his privilege, using only these things, to give the scene just the
fillip of interest which the play demands.
Alfred Roller, a veteran of the scenic revolt of fifteen years ago,
and, next to Reinhardt’s artist, Ernst Stern, the most distinguished
German scenic designer of his time, has made the screens and set
pieces for _The Marriage of Figaro_ and _The Barber of Seville_. There
is little or no good to be said of his work in the latter piece. The
screens with which he indicates a room in the first act, and the bulky
gate which he sets down across the stairs in the second act, are bad as
to color, and quite at odds with the Redoutensaal. Obviously he could
have made so much more amusing a gate out of the permanent stairs, and
given his scene a Spanish stamp by a circle of vivid, tight-packed
flowers in the center. _The Marriage of Figaro_ is much better, though
here again Roller could have done far better if he had turned his eyes
up to the walls above him. The first scene, the servant’s room, is made
by a row of antique screens of faded crimson placed well down stage.
Through a door in the central one, you see green screens, which, in
the second scene are to define the room of the wife. With an excellent
sense of climax, Roller proceeds from the shallow stage of the first
scene to the deeper stage of the second, and finally sweeps in the
whole permanent setting for the wedding in the third scene. More than
that, he calls the stairs and balcony into play, and finally opens the
great doors above the balcony to let us see beyond to a room of crimson
hangings and more crystal. The last scene, the garden, is shoddily
conceived, with a few uninteresting potted trees, a bad painting
of Schönbrunn in the exit under the steps, and a sickly attempt
at moonlight from the floodlights and foots. Why not, you wonder,
delicate, artificial, gilded hedges along the walls, and fruit trees
flattened on _espaliers_ against the steps?
Unquestionably the lighting problem in the Redoutensaal is not yet
solved. Reinhardt looks to solve it with a large light or two concealed
in the forward chandeliers. This may make the illumination of the
stage a little more flexible and expressive; but it is quite as likely
that the way to light the stage is without the least pretense
at illusion. At any rate footlights and lights from the side are
distressing reminders of the conventional theater.
[Illustration:
The first scene of _The Barber of Seville_ as given in the
Redoutensaal. A not altogether successful attempt by Professor Roller
to create an architectural unit which should suggest a Spanish
exterior while harmonizing with the decorations of the ballroom.
]
Almost as reminiscent is the curtain which slides out between acts
while the stage hands move the screens. Why a curtain at all—unless the
curtain of darkness? Why not uniformed attendants managing the simple
matter of screens or small set pieces with the aplomb of actors? Or if
there must be a curtain, why a crimson sheet; why not a hanging whose
folds continue the _motif_ of the Gobelins at each side?
Perhaps the most serious question concerned with the physical
arrangements of this stage is whether there should not be some scheme
of levels other than floor and balcony. A lower forestage would aid
the director in composing his people, and getting movement and variety
out of this fixed and therefore limited setting. It would also aid an
audience that is seated almost on a flat floor.
The sceptic may find other limitations in the Redoutensaal. And he
will be right if he points out that its atmosphere is too sharply
artificial in its distinction to permit every sort of play to be given
here. Gorky’s _Night Lodging_ might be played in the Redoutensaal
as a literally tremendous _tour de force_, but it would be in the
face of spiritual war between the background of the stage and the
physical horrors of the slums which the play describes. Plays for the
Redoutensaal must have some quality of distinction about them, a
great, clear emotion free from the bonds of physical detail, a fantasy
or a poetry as shining as crystal, some artificiality of mood, or else
an agreement in period with the baroque. You can imagine Racine or
Corneille done perfectly here, Euripides only by great genius, _The
Weavers_ not at all. Nothing could suit Molière better, or Beaumarchais
or the Restoration dramatists. Shakespeare could contribute _Twelfth
Night_ and _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, perhaps _Romeo and Juliet_,
but never _Hamlet_. Here, of course, is a perfect stage for Oscar
Wilde, a good stage for Somerset Maugham, A. A. Milne, some of Clare
Kummer. The Moscow Art Theater would have no trouble with _The Cherry
Orchard_. More or less at random, you think of Bahr’s _Josephine_, _The
School for Scandal_, _The Sabine Women_, _Lysistrata_, _The Mollusc_,
_A Marriage of Convenience_, _The Truth_, _Prunella_, _The Beggar’s
Opera_. The one impossible barrier to performance in the Redoutensaal
is Atmosphere. If a play is drenched in the emotions of firesides,
poppy fields, moonlit gardens or natural physical things, it is
impossible here.
These are the limitations of the Redoutensaal, not of its idea. The
permanent setting and its enclosing hall can take the shapes of other
periods and meet almost every demand of the drama except atmosphere.
Ideally the hall should have some sober yet arresting architecture
common to many periods. A neutral order of this sort might be the blank
Roman arches and plain pilasters which are seen so often in modern
buildings. The chandeliers might take a form less ornate and less
blazing; nuances of lighting, if desirable, might then be achieved.
More important, however, would be to have three interchangeable shells
and steps. One set of walls should be classical and severe, suited
to Greek tragedy, _Julius Cæsar_, and, with a bit of brightening, to
Shaw’s _Cæsar and Cleopatra_. Another shell should strike the note of
artificial distinction with which the Redoutensaal now echoes. The
third should be of dark, paneled wood, to suit Shakespearean tragedy,
the comedy of Goldsmith, and modern pieces from _Rosmersholm_ to
_Getting Married_ and from _Alice Sit-by-the-Fire_ to _Magda_.
The idea of a permanent room in which to act a related repertory is
thoroughly applicable even to our peepshow playhouses with their
prosceniums. It would be possible to install a shell or room on the
stage of any reasonably presentable theater, such as Henry Miller’s,
the Little, the Booth, the Plymouth, the Selwyn in New York, the
Künstler in Munich, the Volksbühne, the Kammerspiele in Berlin, the
Comédie des Champs-Elysées in Paris, St. Martin’s in London. The room
would have to be formal, probably without a ceiling, and certainly far
more like a wall than a room. Such a compromise seems the only chance
America may have of experimenting with the idea of the Redoutensaal.
There is nowhere in this country a room so naturally fitted to the
purpose by its beauty as was the ballroom of the Hapsburgs. The
building of a fresh structure is a little too much to ask; for we
have hardly the directors or actors to launch unpractised upon such a
costly and critical test. It might be risked perhaps, as Frank Lloyd
Wright proposed risking it, in a theater of a purely artistic nature
far from Broadway. Wright designed for Aline Barnsdall a playhouse to
be erected in California, with an adjustable proscenium, a stage with a
dome that all but continued over the auditorium, and, upon the stage,
a plain curving wall some ten feet high, following the shape of the
dome. The nearest analogy to the Redoutensaal that has been actually
attempted in America is probably the adaptation which Director Sam Hume
and the artists Rudolph Schaeffer and Norman Edwards made of the Greek
Theater in Berkeley, California, for _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Twelfth
Night_. There is a certain significance, however, in the pleasure which
our scenic artists seem to get out of a play which gives them only
one setting to design, but which requires them to wring from it, by
means of lights, many moods and a variety of visual impressions. Lee
Simonson’s circus greenroom for _He Who Gets Slapped_ and Norman-Bel
Geddes’ sitting room for _The Truth About Blayds_ showed how seductive
to the artist of the theater may be the game of playing with lights in
a permanent setting.
Approached purely from the point of view of scenic art, or the
so-called new stagecraft, the Redoutensaal presents excellent reasons
for its existence. Historically it could be defended by a study of the
theater from the Greeks, with their day-lit, architectural background,
to Georgian times when the stage and the house were both lighted by the
same chandeliers, and the wide apron, the boxes, and the proscenium
made a sort of permanent setting which was varied by the shifting
backcloths. But if we go no further back than the days when Craig
and Appia were beginning to write, and before their voices and their
pencils had won an audience among theater directors, we shall find
the start of an evolutionary development for which the idea of the
Redoutensaal provides a plausible climax. In the first decade of the
twentieth century, the “flat” was flat indeed, and the painted wing and
backdrop ruled. If there was any depth, it was the space between wing
and wing, or the false space of painted perspective. Then the ideas of
Craig and Appia, making a curious alliance with Realism, forced the
plastic upon the stage. The solid, three-dimensional setting dominated.
When directors and artists began to discover the physical and
spiritual limitations of “real” settings which could present nothing
bigger than the actual stage space, many went back to the painted
flat. It was a different flat, however, one painted with dynamic and
expressive design. The third method is seldom quite satisfactory.
The living actor, with his three-dimensional being, clashes with
the two-dimensional painting. The result is bad from a realistic or
illusionistic point of view; and, as soon as we think of the stage in
terms of a frank convention, we find that we want the emphasis thrown
upon the actor as the more interesting and the more difficult element.
We want a defined and permanent artificiality that shall give the actor
scope, serve as a _pied-à-terre_, not join in a fantastic competition.
We can escape plastic and limited reality in the Redoutensaal, while
we supply the actor with a background that harmonizes with the living
character of his body. At the same time we can secure the vivid
indication of mood or time or place which we seek, and achieve it more
vividly because of the permanence of the main fabric of the stage, and
its contrast with the merely indicated setting.
German scene designers and directors move in theory steadily towards
what they call the podium, the platform pure and simple, from which the
player addresses the audience openly as a player. In practice they tend
steadily to try to approach this by driving out as much of changing
scenic background as possible. They place something in the middle
of the stage, a table, a flight of steps, a pillar, a bed, and they
try to eliminate the rest of the stage. Jessner does this in Berlin
by using his cyclorama as a neutral boundary without character in
itself. Fehling, the director of _Masse-Mensch_, uses black curtains,
and the artist Krehan by the same means tries to center our attention
on small set pieces placed in the middle of the stage and designed
to represent corners of rooms or a sofa by a window. Black curtains
appear everywhere in Germany—perhaps as an expression of the mood of
the beaten nation, but also unquestionably from a desire to drive out
both Realism and pretense and to leave as little as possible upon the
stage except the actor and the barest and most essential indication of
setting. The German uses black curtains to achieve nothingness. Instead
he gets desolation, spiritual negation. In the Redoutensaal, the actor
is backed up by space. It is a positive presence instead of a negative
background. Yet it does not obtrude, this splendid room, with its gold
and gray, its mirrors and its tapestries. These things float in the
back of consciousness, filling what might be a disquieting void or a
depressing darkness. Always the cream walls dominate the gray, and
always the living actor, driving his message directly at the spectator,
dominates them all.
CHAPTER XVI
THE CIRQUE MEDRANO
Perhaps the gladiators gave it a bad name. At any rate for twenty
centuries men have hesitated to put anything more serious than a clown
or an athlete in the middle of an audience. The Romans could hardly be
called a timorous, a sensitive or a conventional people, yet even they
never thought of presenting a play in an amphitheater. C. Curio, rich
and reckless, celebrated the death of his father by building two great
wooden theaters back to back, giving performances in both at the same
time, then whirling the spectators about on turn tables, until they
faced each other, and the two semicircles of seats joined and made one
huge arena. But, though Curio was reckless of money and of the lives
of his guests, he was careful of the esthetic proprieties. The actors
performed in the theaters, and the animals in the arena.
So far as the feelings of the Drama can be learned, she did not approve
of the way the Romans shoved her actors out of the old Greek orchestra,
and crammed them into a shallow little box, which they called a stage.
The first chance that the Drama had, she climbed down close to the
people again, and played on the stone floor of the medieval churches.
Even Shakespeare did not have the temerity to try to put her back in a
box. It is said that there were rare times, as in some of the outdoor
mysteries of the Middle Ages and while the pageant wagons carried the
actors and their scenes into the squares of the English towns, when
you might have found the Drama entirely surrounded by the hosts of her
admirers. But some curious and perverse power seems to have schemed
through the centuries to seize a decadent time like the Roman days or
the last fifty years in modern Europe, and clap the Drama in a box. And
to-day, when the Drama is bravely insisting on a little air and light,
the power is still strong enough to keep the Drama’s liberators from
placing her naked and unashamed in the center of her fellows. She is no
longer a peepshow lure, but we still hesitate to treat her as a goddess.
Occasionally a theorist, who is as sick as the rest of us of the fourth
wall convention, comes forward with some extraordinary proposal to put
the audience in the middle of the drama. Furttenbach in the seventeenth
century laid out a square theater with a stage in each corner. Oskar
Strnad of Vienna wants to place a doughnut stage two thirds round the
audience; and some Frenchman has advocated whirling the doughnut.
Anything to distract the spectator from the drama; nothing to
concentrate him upon it.
In the “Theater of the Five Thousand” devised by Max Reinhardt in
Berlin, and in the imitation which Firmin Gémier launched at the Cirque
d’Hiver in Paris, the audience and the drama at last met in the circus.
But for some curious reason—at which I have only guessed in a more or
less absurd fashion—neither Reinhardt nor Gémier was courageous or
far-seeing enough to use the circus as a circus. Neither dared put the
players in the center, and forget the old stage. At one side there
always lingered a palace or a proscenium.
Reinhardt might make the excuse that for such a scheme he needed a
round circus, and that a round circus would be far too big for the
drama. (He would not be absurd enough to say that Moissi or Pallenberg
could not act unless all the audience saw all his face all the time).
There are round circuses in Europe, however, and small, round circuses,
and if Reinhardt could not find one in Berlin, he could have built one
for half the money he put into reconstructing the Circus Schumann into
the Grosses Schauspielhaus.
Up on Montmartre, just under the last heights on which perches Sacré
Cœur, there is such a circus. An intimate circus, a little circus, just
the place to begin the last experiment with the theater. Copeau could
go straight there from the Vieux-Colombier, and throw his _Scapin_ into
the ring without a second’s hesitation. It would bowl over Paris and
half the theatrical world.
Copeau could go straight there, but I think the audience should be
required, for a time, to make a detour via the top of Montmartre.
Certainly that is the only way to approach the Cirque Medrano to-day. A
_fiacre_ to the funicular. The funicular to the base of the cathedral.
A stroll all round that boarded-up curiosity. A look-off at Paris
swimming in the ebb-tide of the summer sun. Then supper in the Place du
Tertre. Not for the food, which is as good as any _cuisine bourgeoise_;
nor for the trees and window-groups out of Manet; nor for the tubby
widow of forty-five who sings:
Je le proclame,
Les mains de femme
Sont les bijoux
Dont je suis fou....
or the ancient with the two brass buttons in the back of his surtout
and the patience of an English politician, who recites inaudible and
probably unintelligible poetry before passing the hat. Supper in the
Place du Tertre is an appropriate prelude to the Cirque Medrano because
of the dog that watches all evening from the tin roof of an impossibly
ruined house, and the women straight out of the French Revolution, the
days of ’48 and the Commune, who stand about with their great naked
arms akimbo, and their strong sharp chins, high cheek bones, and eagle
eyes waiting for the liberty cap to crown them. The dog and the women,
they are the audience and the show. They are the Cirque Medrano.
This circus is a golden bowl. At the bottom, no sawdust but a carpet
of hemp, a great “welcome” doormat without the lettering; we take the
deed for the word. Outside the ring is a parapet nicely carpeted in
yellow; one of the clowns finds it amusing to roll round this track
on his shoulders. Above the parapet rise steep rows of seats, half of
them in bright orange for the spectators with fifty or sixty cents to
spend. Higher up the thin and graceful pillars which support the roof
cut across the vision a little; here there are only benches and the
_dévotés_. At opposite sides of the ring, walled passages lead out to
the greenroom and public entrances which circle underneath the seats.
Exits for the audience pierce the rows at the four quarters. From the
disk of the dome above, sixteen great lamps blaze down on the ring, and
sometimes a spotlight or two punctuate the darkness.
If you like to take your pleasure sentimentally, a performance at the
Cirque Medrano is like opening old letters—with a comic valentine now
and then for tonic. Huck Finn saw a one-ring circus; but Gentry’s Dog
and Pony Show is the farthest that the present generation ever get from
the three-ring-and-two-stage monstrosity which deafens our ears and
dulls our eyes.
The Cirque Medrano is the proper place for artists and _connoisseurs_.
The fifteen hundred people that it holds can study—and do study—with
the minute intensity of an anatomical clinic, M. Grossi and Coquette,
as the horseman, quite as proud as his mare, puts her through five
minutes of marching to music. They turn their eyes with just as much
appreciation to watch the aerialists, plunging into their dangerous
pastimes under the lights. Here M. Lionel, _Roi du Vertige_, gets the
sort of attention he could never win on the vaudeville stage; it must
seem to him sometimes, as he manœuvers gingerly on a chair balanced by
its right hind leg in the neck of a bottle which is perched in turn on
a ten foot pole, that the towering rows of seats are about to topple
over on the strange career which he has made of himself.
There is no question, then, about the sight-lines of the theater which
Copeau should make out of the Cirque Medrano. There never was such an
auditorium for sheer visibility. The last rows are better than the
first; they take in the whole audience as well as the show, while all
you can say for the front seats is that they would show you half of the
laughing or crying crowd of men and women, hanging over the actors in
far from mute adoration. The slant of these seats is greater than the
slant in Max Littmann’s theaters in Munich, but, because the rows swing
all round, you never get that feeling of awful vacancy and gap which
comes to spectators in the upper rows of the Prinzregenten and the
Künstler Theaters in Munich. And there is no proscenium arch to press
down upon the poor midgets at the bottom of the playhouse.
“But their backs? How about the actors’ backs?”
That is a foolish question from any one who has ever seen Copeau’s
players, who has watched Jouvet’s back play the coarse, immense
Karamazov, or seen his legs and buttocks send Aguecheek shuffling
across the stage, or caught the whole quick poise of Suzanne Bing’s
Viola in her shoulders and hips.
It is nothing short of the ravings of a mad man if the questioner has
been to the Cirque Medrano, and looked upon the clowns. People have
wondered how the actors of the Grosses Schauspielhaus could play to
three audiences at once, the one in front, the one at the right, and
the one at the left; here are the clowns playing to four. It is not
all slapstick either. There is almost no whacking in the clowns’ own
turns. In these scenes they work out broad little comedy skits such
as Ray and Johnny Dooley, Leon Errol and Walter Catlett, Eddie Cantor
and George Le Maire, Willie and Eugene Howard, or Weber & Fields might
offer in our revues. The difference at the Medrano is that the actors
seem to have consciously developed their gestures and their poses as
supplementary expression to their faces. Also they warily work round
during their scenes, and give each part of the audience the benefit of
both back and face. The comedy of the Medrano is far funnier than the
comedy of _The Follies_ or the comedy of the Redoutensaal in Vienna;
and not because the turns are broader. It is funnier because it is so
intimately alive, because it is made with all the actor’s body, and
because it is always directed at an audience. Four audiences at once!
It is a priceless advantage. The actor has always some one to press
his art upon. In our theater half an actor’s body is dead, or else
vainly talking to the scenery. That is an understatement, if anything.
The only way the actor can get directly at our audience, register upon
it the impact of his art, his personality, his emotion, is to turn
away from the scene and make his speech into a monologue. That is the
chief difficulty which stands in way of the sort of acting which deals
directly and frankly with the audience, which admits that it is art and
not reality, which says that the actor is an actor and the audience
is an actor, too; the kind of acting, in short, which is called
presentational in contrast to the realistic method of representation
which rules our theater. On any stage that is surrounded by its
audience, the player can speak to his fellow-actor and to his audience
at the same time. In the Medrano it is no question of backs or faces.
The whole man plays, and every inch of him has an audience.
There remains, however, the question of setting. Clowns need no
atmosphere, but Hamlet must speak to a ghost. An acrobat is his own
scenery, but Juliet needs a balcony. Can the Medrano manage such
things? Can this open ring do what the stage of the Redoutensaal balks
at?
The Medrano can do almost anything that our theater can do—and a great
many things more—because it can use the three essentials of setting and
atmosphere: light, human bodies, and indications of place.
Light.... It is the fifth turn in the Cirque Medrano. Lydia _et_ Henry,
“Babies Dancers,” two pitiable little children, who have been taught
to do very bad imitations of their elders in the banal dances of the
revues. After they have hopped and shaken their way uncertainly through
two or three fox trots and shimmies, the great lights in the roof go
out. Blackness, then a stain of amber in the center of the ring. The
light brightens and the stain lengthens. It might fall upon the stone
of an old cistern, if some one had thought to put it there. Then, when
the figure of Salome crawls out along the stain, it would be many
moments before we could see that it was the body of a four-year-old,
whom some one had togged out with breast-plates. Or again darkness,
and slowly a blue-green light from on high, and in the midst of it an
Apache and a girl. It needs no curb, no lamp-post, no brick corner, to
make the ring a moonlit street.
After light, there comes the human body. The Medrano as a circus does
nothing to show how the actors themselves can make a setting. Why
should it? But I remember the project of an American artist, in 1914,
to put _The Cenci_ upon the stage of a prize ring, and I remember how
the sketches showed a chorus of human figures in costumes and with
staves, circling about the people of Shelley’s play and forming a
dozen frames to the drama within.
[Illustration: An impression of the Cirque Medrano in Paris.]
After light and a setting of bodies comes just as much of the ordinary
plastic scenery of the stage as you need, and just as little as you can
get along with. If you care to dig a bit under the ring, and install
machinery that will lower the floor in sections, pile up hills in
concentric circles or even lift a throne or a well or an altar into the
middle of the circus while the lights are out—well, there is nothing
to prevent you. Juliet’s balcony may hang above one of the entrances;
or in the center of the stage throughout the whole action of _Les
Fourberies de Scapin_ may stand the _tréteau_ or block, which Copeau
makes the center of the action at the Vieux-Colombier. Scenically the
problem of the Medrano is the most fascinating problem of the stage
artist, the creation of a single permanent structure, large or small,
which can stand throughout a play and give significant aid to the
various scenes.
It is no such difficult task to imagine productions in the Medrano as
it is to find plays for the Redoutensaal. The accompanying sketch shows
an arrangement for _The Merchant of Venice_. Glowing Venetian lanterns
are hung in the spaces between the arches at the top of the theater.
The four entrances for the public are made entrances for the players
as well. Below each gate is a double stair, railed at the top with
Venetian iron. Between the stairs are benches, again in the shape of
the period. The railings become the copings of the Rialto. The casket
scenes are played in the center of the arena, while Portia and Nerissa
watch the proceedings from a bench at one side; another bench seats the
judges in the courtroom. Jessica leans out from an entrance to flirt
with her lover, and the carnival mob chases old Shylock up and down the
little stairs, over the benches, round about and out one of the two
lower gates to the ring.
The ghost scene in _Hamlet_? Imagine the sentinel’s companions moonlit
in the center. Imagine a gallery behind the arches lighted with a dim
and ghostly radiance. And imagine Marcellus suddenly and fearfully
pointing to the figure of the dead man where it moves above the last
row of spectators. No mixing of actors and audience, but what a thrill
to see the ghost across a gulf of turned and straining faces, what a
horror to see him over your own shoulder! Later Hamlet climbs stone by
stone to meet and speak with the ghost from a platform above one of the
great entrances.
_The Jest_—its prison scene? A block in the middle of the ring, a
single glaring light from straight above, and the figure of Neri
chained to the block.
[Illustration:
_The Merchant of Venice_ as it might be given in the Cirque Medrano.
]
_Masse-Mensch?_ But a mob-play is too easy. The scene of the defeat,
for instance; light upon the steps in the middle of the ring, workers
piled up on it, messengers and refugees running in from gate after
gate, from all four entrances, flinging themselves back on the
crowd in the center as the news of fresh disaster comes. The rattle
of firearms; lights against the back of the high gallery, and the
silhouettes of a score of machine guns trained on the actors and the
audience.
It would be foolish to deny that the Medrano is not a theater for every
play. It could not hold some that the artificiality of the Redoutensaal
would make welcome—Oscar Wilde’s, for instance—along with most of the
conversational Realism of the past thirty years. But it could house
all that the Grosses Schauspielhaus is fitted for—Greek tragedy and
comedy, Shakespeare’s greatest plays, dramas like _Florian Geyer_, _The
Weavers_, and _Danton_. Some of the scenes of such pieces, the intimate
episodes which Reinhardt’s circus balks at, could be done excellently
in the Medrano. It has all the intimacy of Copeau’s theater, and it
could bring into its ring many dramas of to-day,—_The Emperor Jones_,
_Strife_,—which are impossible in the Vieux-Colombier. The Medrano has
its limitations, of course, but they are not the limitations of size,
emotion, or period. The plays that it could not do would be the plays
least worth doing, at their best the plays which give to a reader
almost all that they have to give.
If you should try to make a comparison of method, rather than of
limitations, between the three active presentational theaters of
Europe, and the fourth that might be, it would run, I think something
like this: The Grosses Schauspielhaus tries to deceive you in curious
ways,—with dome and scenery and cloud machine. The Vieux-Colombier
carefully explains to you that this is a theater, and that this is also
life. The Redoutensaal asks you to dress up and see something artistic.
The Medrano unites you and overwhelms you.
The thing that impresses any one who studies the Medrano from the point
of view of play production—it may even impress the reader who tries
to understand and sympathize with these attempts to suggest how plays
might be produced there—is the great variety which such a theater
offers and always the sense of unity which it creates. From every angle
relationships center upon the actor, or cut across one another as he
moves about, makes entrances or exits, or appears in the back of the
audience. All these relationships work to a fine, natural unity. There
is the actor in the center with the audience about him; there is the
actor on the rim drawing the audience out and across to him. There
are three circles of action within one another in a single unity. And
there is the sense of all this which the audience has as it looks down,
Olympian, from its banks of seats.
Something of the vision of the aeroplane invades the Medrano. We see
life anew. We see it cut across on a fresh plane. Patterns appear of
which we had no knowledge. Relationships become clear that were once
confusion. We catch a sense of the roundness and rightness of life. And
in the Medrano, while we win this vision in a new dimension, we do
not lose the feel of the old. Such a theater establishes both for us.
It gives us the three unities of space in all their fulness. They cut
across one another like the planes of a hypercube. And the deeper they
cut, the deeper grows the unity.
The Medrano seems to solve two problems of the modern theater. These
arise from two desires in the leading directors and artists. One is to
throw out the actor into sharp relief, stripped of everything but the
essential in setting. This motivates a production like _Masse-Mensch_,
with black curtains blotting out all but the center of the stage,
and a theater like the Redoutensaal, with the actor placed amidst a
background of formal and permanent beauty. The Medrano supplies a
living background, the background of the audience itself. It is the
background of life instead of death, a fulness of living things instead
of the morbid emptiness of black curtains. It is a background more
enveloping and animating than the ballroom of Maria Theresa. It is a
background that accords with every mood, and is itself a unity.
The other problem is a psychological and a physical problem, the
problem of life-principles in art. In the beginning the theater
was masculine. Its essence was a thrust. The phallus was borne in
the processional ritual at the opening of the Theater of Dionysus
each spring; and its presence was significant. The greatest and the
healthiest of the theaters have always plunged their actors into
the midst of the audience. It is only decadence, whether Roman or
Victorian, that has withdrawn the actor into a sheath, a cave, a mouth,
and has tried to drag the spirit of the spectator in with him. The peep
show is essentially evil. I will not say it is feminine, but I will say
that the art of the theater is a masculine art, that it is assertive
and not receptive. Its business is to imbue the audience. It is not too
difficult to see in the proscenium arch the reason for the barrenness
of the realistic theater. Directors and artists who have felt this
have tried to find a playhouse that lies nearer to the masculine vigor
of Æschylus and Shakespeare. I think they can find it in the Cirque
Medrano.
CHAPTER XVII
THE OLD SPIRIT—THE NEW THEATER
It is hard to escape the belief that this ferment in the theater means
something. Something for life and from life; something for art and from
art. Something immensely important to the sense of godhead in man which
is life and art together, life and art fecundating one another.
It seems peculiarly clear that the new forces in the theater have
been working towards a spiritual change far more novel, far more
interesting, and naturally far more important than any of the technical
changes which they have brought about.
The technical changes have been confusing. First this business of
scenic designers and revolving stages and all manner of show and
mechanism; and now the “naked stage,” abdication of the artist,
scrapping of the machines, the actor alone, on a podium or in a circus
ring. All in the name of drama.
There is only one explanation. These changes have come as part of an
attempt to restore the theater to its old functions. They are two very
extraordinary functions. One may be debauched into titillation, or may
rise to that fulness of vitality, that excitation, upon which the
second function of the theater is based, the function of exaltation.
Between the older theater, in which these functions worked as potently
as they worked seldom, and the theater in which they may work again,
lay the theater of Realism. It was a product of a tremendous force,
a force for evil as well as good—the force of nineteenth century
science. Science made the theater realistic and Realism made the drama
scientific. It ceased to be a show. It became a photograph. The drama
was made “truer,” but only in the sense that a photograph may be truer
to fact than a drawing by Picasso. It achieved resemblance to life. And
then it ceased to have excitement or exaltation, because excitement,
in the vivid sense in which I use it here, is most uncommon in modern
life, and because exaltation is a rare and hidden thing showing seldom
in outward relations. Both are too exceptional for Realism.
The restoration of excitement to the theater may appear to degrade it
from the exact and austere report of life which Realism demands. But
the thrill of movement and event is the element in the theater which
lifts our spirits to the point where exaltation is possible. The power
of the theater lies in just this ability to raise us to ecstasy through
the love of vitality which is the commonest sign of divinity in life.
And when the theater gives us ecstasy, what becomes of science? And who
cares?
The new forces in the theater have struggled more or less blindly
toward this end. They have tried beauty, richness, novelty, to win
back excitement. They have only just begun to see that the liveliest
excitation in the playhouse may come from the art of the actor and the
art of the _régisseur_ when they are stripped to the task of providing
exaltation. Present the actor as an actor, and the background as an
honest, material background, and you are ready for what glories the
playwright and the peculiar genius of the theater can provide. The
drama is free again for its eternal task—the showing of the soul of
life.
Just how much this may mean is perhaps the test of your belief in the
theater. It is the conviction of some of us that there has resided in
the theater—and our hope that there may reside once more—something akin
to the religious spirit. A definition of this spirit is difficult.
It is certainly not religion. It goes behind religion. It is the
exaltation of which formal creeds are a product. It is the vitality
which informs life, and begets art. Out of the intensity of spiritual
feeling which rises from the eternal processes of the universe and in
turn becomes conscious of them, the thing is born which made Greek
tragedy noble and which called drama back to life in the Middle Ages.
Then it was the spirit of religion. To-day we might call it the spirit
of life.
Both consciously and unconsciously men of the theater have sought to
win back this exaltation. The latest attempt is in some ways the most
daring and the most interesting. Max Reinhardt, leaving the playhouse,
has tried to find it in a wedding of the drama and the church. Before
this book is published, Reinhardt will have produced Calderon’s
mystic drama, _The Theater of the World_, under the high altar of the
Collegienkirche in Salzburg. It is impossible now to speak of how far
he has been able to effect an esthetic union between the handsome
rococo edifice and the platform for his players; it is only possible to
speculate on the spiritual feeling which spectators may gain through
looking up at the actors from a flat floor, instead of looking down
upon them. I cannot speak of the actual presence of exaltation in the
audience, but we can speculate together on the possibilities of winning
back spiritual vitality for the drama by union with the church.
First of all, there comes the disquieting thought that the theater
presents the spectacle these days of a bird that lays eggs in another
bird’s nest. It isn’t content with the one it has used for some
centuries. It must go snooping about looking for a new haven for the
drama. It tries the circus. It tries the ballroom. It shows us the
Grosses Schauspielhaus and the Redoutensaal. It even seems to have
got a notion of laying its eggs on the fourth wall. As this was the
only thing that wasn’t thoroughly real in the realistic theater, the
result—the motion picture—is a bit of a scramble. And now the cuckoo
theater has its eye on the church.
A truer charge might be that the human animal has a perverse liking
for novelty; but even that could be countered with the assertion that
out of the stimulation of novelty, as out of almost any stimulation,
man can make art—if he has it in him. As to that strange bird, the
theater, it has never had good home-keeping habits. It laid its eggs
on Greek altars, and in the mangers of Christian chapels. It nested
in the inn yard in England, and the tennis court in France. The fact
that the theater has a habit of roaming is worth about as much in this
discussion of its chance in the modern church as the fact that it
once found ecstasy by the Greek altar and produced little approaching
dramatic literature while it was in the Christian church.
Jacques Copeau complains that the drama has no home to-day, and asserts
that between the only choices open to it—the church and the street—he
much prefers the street. The church doesn’t want the drama; its creed
doesn’t want the drama; its spirit repels the drama. In this relation
of the church and the theater there seems to be a problem for Europe
and a problem for America. The possibility of the two uniting appears
much greater in Europe. Europe—particularly central and southern
Europe, where Catholicism flourishes—holds far more of genuine
religious spirit than does America. Moreover, the church there has the
strength of tradition and of art behind it. The esthetic-emotional grip
of the churches themselves, their architecture, their atmosphere,
the sense of continuity that lives in them, holds men and women whose
minds have rejected or ignored the authority of dogma. Even an American
cut off from the traditional side of this life would feel a thrill
in a drama in the Collegienkirche in Salzburg or in the Cathedral of
Chartres that no performance in a theater could give him. The beauty
of the ages would bless the drama in almost any European building
except a theater. But come to America, and try to imagine _Everyman_
in Trinity Church at the head of Wall street, or _The Theater of the
World_ in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, not to bring it down
to the level of a Methodist meeting house. The theater can always
make religion more dramatic; witness the experiments of the Reverend
William Norman Guthrie and Claude Bragdon with lighting and dance in
St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie. But I do not think that any American church
short of some Spanish-Indian mission in the Southwest can make the
drama more religious.
For America—and, I suspect, for Europe, too—the problem is to find a
way to the religious spirit independent of the church. It is not a
question of producing plays in cathedrals, but of producing the spirit
of life in plays. It is not: Can religion make itself theatrical? But:
Can the theater make itself—in a new sense—religious?
If modern life, particularly the life of America, were spiritual in
any degree, all this would be simple. Church and theater would both
minister—as neither of them does now—to the life of the spirit. America
has no art and no religion which can make drama religious. America does
not believe, in any deep sense. Science has shattered dogma, and formal
religion has not been able to absorb an artistic or a philosophic
spirit great enough to recreate the religious spirit in men.
The thing is still more difficult because there is nowhere in this
country—unless, again, it is in the Southwest—a sense of the age-long
processes of life, which are part of the soil and which leave their
mark on men and women through the physical things that have always
cradled them. In Europe even the cities hold this ancient and natural
aspect; they are shaped by man and time, even as the fields and the
hills are shaped by time and man. These cities bask, and lie easy.
There is a sense of long, slow growth in the very stones. In America,
it is not only that our cities are new and brash. Our countryside is
the same. Even our farmhouses stick out of the land like square boxes.
As simple a house in Europe has a breadth that reconciles it with the
sweep of the fields. The American farmhouse is symbol of our separation
from the soil. We are out of touch with the earthy vitality of life
which might bring us at least a little sense of the eternal.
If the man of the theater gives up the American church as a path to the
spirit of life, and if he finds no religion in modernity from which to
bring religion to the stage, what can he do? Is it possible that he can
create the spiritual in the people by creating it in the theater? Can
he see the vision himself; and, if he sees it and embodies it, can it
make over the people?
Clive Bell, writing in _Art_, has described how such artists as
William Blake and a very few others have reached the spiritual reality
of existence—the thing we should call religion—directly, by pure
intuition: “Some artists seem to have come at it by sheer force of
imagination, unaided by anything without them; they have needed no
material ladder to help them out of matter. They have spoken with
reality as mind to mind.”
Vision of this sort is so inordinately rare, that it seems as though
some other way must be found to open spiritual truth to the artist of
the theater. The only other way is through the deepest understanding
of life itself. What can the artist find in American life to bring
the vision? Nothing, surely, on the surface. Our architects have
reached a more noteworthy expression than perhaps any of our painters,
because they have somehow managed to identify themselves with a spirit
of affirmation behind those industrial forms that our commercial
imperialism presents to view in our men of position like Morgan and
Ford, our periodicals like _The American Magazine_ and _The Saturday
Evening Post_, our subways and our cigarette ads, our patent medicines
and our Kuppenheimer clothes.
The artist of the theater who is to create ecstasy by finding it,
must see deeper than the architects behind the shams of American life.
He must grasp the Spirit of America in a sense so extraordinary that
the use we ordinarily make of that phrase will seem impossibly and
blasphemously cheap. We have hints of what the artist must see and
understand in Sandburg’s sense of Chicago, in Vachel Lindsay’s sense of
the Middle West, in Waldo Frank’s sense of New Mexico.
When theatrical genius has grasped the truth of America, it must be his
business to make of himself and his theater a magnifying glass for the
rest of his fellows. What he has been able to seize by sheer intuition,
he must put in such form that it can seize all America. It is the hope
of the theater that it can make the vision of one man become the vision
of many.
There is no reason why a man of the theater should not have the vision;
it has come to other artists. They have been able to transfer some
share of it to the sensitive, the developed, the intellectual. The
artist of the theater can perhaps transfer it to millions, to the
uneducated and the dull, as well as to the receptive. In the theater
he has a very extraordinary instrument. It is the art nearest to life;
its material is almost life itself. This physical identity which it
has with our very existence is the thing that can enable the artist to
visualize with amazing intensity a religious spirit of which he has
sensed only the faintest indications in life. He can create a world
which shines with exaltation and which seems—as it indeed is—a world
of reality. He can give the spirit a pervading presence in the theater
which it once had in the life of the Greeks and of the people of the
Middle Ages. And when men and women see eternal spirit in such a form,
who can say that they will not take it to them?
THE END
INDEX
INDEX
In the case of a number of plays listed in this index, the names of
the director and the artist responsible for the particular production
in question are coupled in a parenthesis preceding the numbers of the
pages on which the production is mentioned; a semi-colon separates
references to such special productions from references to the play
alone. In the case of theaters listed, the name of the city in which
each is located appears in parenthesis.
Ars System, 73-76, 116.
André, Harald, opp. 54, 75, 77, 78, 79, opp. 120, 121-122, opp. 122.
Æschylus, 6, 92, 212.
Albert Theater (Dresden), 33.
_Alice Sit-by-the-Fire_, 193.
Allard, Robert, 105, 181.
_American Magazine, The_, 220.
Amphitheater, 46.
Andreyeff, Leonid, 25.
Anglin, Margaret, 98.
_Annonce faite à Marie, L’_, (Dalcroze-Appia), 159.
Appia, Adolphe, 42, 44, 68-69, 70, 107, 138, 159, 195.
Arnold, Victor, 82.
_Art_, 19, 220.
Austrian State Opera House, see Vienna Opera House.
_Awakening of Spring, The_, 28.
_Back to Methuselah_, (Simonson), 73, 76.
Bahr, Hermann, 192.
Bakshy, Alexander, 99, 100, 158.
Bakst, Leon, 44, 48.
Balieff, N. F., 107.
Ballets Russes, 44.
_Barber of Seville, The_, 186, 189-190, opp. 190.
Barnsdall, Aline, 159, 194.
Barrie, Sir J. M., 8.
Barrymore, Lionel, 87.
Barton, Jim, 86.
Bassermann, Albert, 82.
Bataille, Henry, 6.
Beaumarchais, 192.
_Beggar’s Opera, The_, 192.
Belasco, David, 14, 25, 42, 176.
Bell, Clive, 19-20, 220.
Ben-Ami, Jacob, 94.
Berlin State Opera House, opp. 60, 146.
Berlin State Schauspielhaus, 55, 72, 78, 84;
(Acting company), 88-89, 139-140;
(Jessner’s productions there), 130-143;
see illus., _Napoleon_, _Othello_, and _Richard III_.
Berlin Volksbühne, see Volksbühne.
Bernhardt, Sarah, 98, 104.
Bertens, Rosa, 82.
Bibiena, see Galli-Bibiena.
Bing, Suzanne, 180, 204.
Blake, Wm., 220.
_Blätter des Deutschen Theaters_, 162.
_Blaue Vogel, Der_, 83.
Booth, Edwin, 98.
Booth Theater (New York), 193.
Bouquet, Romain, 181.
Bragdon, Claude, 218.
Brahm, Otto, 42, 110.
Brice, Fanny, 102.
Bronnen, Arnold, 29.
Burbage, 92.
_Burghers of Calais_, 137.
Burgtheater (Vienna), 55, 56, 84, 177.
Butler, Samuel, 118.
_Cæsar and Cleopatra_, 193.
Calderon, 117, 188, 216.
_Caliban_ (MacKaye-Ordynski-Urban-Jones), 159, 161.
Cantor, Eddie, 204.
Capek, Karel, 34, 35, 36.
Carroll, Lewis, 58.
_Carrosse du St.-Sacrement, Le_, (Copeau-Jouvet), 104, 179, opp. 180.
Catlett, Walter, 204.
_Cenci, The_, 206.
Cézanne, 6, 38.
_Chauve-Souris_, 83, 107.
Chaplin, Charlie, 86, 99.
Cheney, Sheldon, 175.
_Cherry Orchard, The_, (Stanislavsky), 8-16, opp. 10, 28, 90, 95, 192.
_Chout (le Bouffon)_, (Gontcharova), 124-125.
Church Theater, 170, 216-218.
Circus Schumann (Berlin), 110, 162, 164, 200.
Circus Theater, 110, 157, 162-170, 198-212, 213, 216.
Cirque d’Hiver (Paris), 200.
Cirque Medrano (Paris), viii, 198-212, opp. 206, opp. 208.
Clark, Bobbie, 102.
Claudel, Paul, 159.
_Clavigor_, 117, 188.
Cloud-machine, 75-76, 77.
Collegienkirche (Salzburg), 216, 218.
Color Organ, 76.
Comédie des Champs-Élysées (Paris), 193, see illus., _He Who Gets
Slapped_ and _Uncle Vanya_.
Cooper, Claude, 85, 105.
Copeau, Jacques, viii, 25, 42, 55, 85, 104, 105, 106, 159, 171-183,
opp. 174, opp. 180, 188, 200, 203, 204, 207, 209, 217.
Corneille, 192.
Craig, Gordon, 18, 19, 25, 42, 44, 56, 57, 107, 111, 131, 139, 160,
195.
Craven, Frank, 96, 97-98.
Curio, C., 198.
Cyclorama, 71, 72, 74, 116.
Czech National Theater (Prague), 34.
Dalcroze, Jaques-, 159.
_Dame Cobalt_, 117, 188.
D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 8.
Dante, 159.
_Danton_, (Reinhardt-Stern), 110, 167, 168; 209.
_Das Bist Du_, (Linnebach), 73.
Deutsches Opernhaus (Charlottenburg), 59.
Deutsches Theater (Berlin), 110, 111.
Diegelmann, Wilhelm, 82.
Dietrich, M., 82, 90, 149-150.
_Divine Comedy, The_, 159.
Dome, 70-72, 153.
_Don Giovanni_, 59.
Dooley, Johnny, 204.
Dooley, Ray, 204.
Draper, Ruth, 102.
_Dream Play, The_, 28;
(Reinhardt), 107.
Drehbühne, see Revolving stage.
Dresden Opera House, 60, 73.
Dresden Schauspielhaus, 25, 60-61, 72;
(Acting company), 87-88.
Duchamp, Marcel, 38.
Duncan, Augustin, 85.
Dürer, A., 48.
Duse, Eleanora, 80, 99.
Eames, Clare, 98.
Ebert, Carl, 88.
Edwards, Norman, 194.
Eibenschütz, Camilla, 82.
_Emperor Jones, The_, 209.
_Erdgeist_, 28, 83.
Errol, Leon, 204.
Euripides, 192.
_Evergreen Tree, The_, 159, 161.
_Everyman_, (Lindberg), 112;
(Reinhardt), 162; 218.
Eysoldt, Gertrud, 82.
_Faust_, (Reinhardt-Stern), opp. 108.
Fehling, Jürgen, 119, 144, 148-156, opp. 148, opp. 150, opp. 152,
opp. 154, opp. 156, 196.
_Festspiel_, (Reinhardt), 162.
Fields, Lew, 204.
_First Year, The_, 96.
_Florian Geyer_, 5;
(Stieler-Goldschmidt), 55, 86, 89, 102;
(Reinhardt), 168; 209.
_Follies, The_, 204.
Ford, Henry, 220.
Forestage, 116, 159, 162-163, 168, 169, 173, 174, 175, 176, 181, 191.
Formal stage, 64, 65, 104, 159, 173, 176.
Forrest, Edwin, 98.
Forrest, Marguerite, 85.
Forster, Rudolf, 89.
Fortuny, M., 69, 70.
Fortuny System, 69-70.
_Fourberies de Scapin, Les_, 200, 207.
France, Anatole, 14, 37.
_Francesca da Rimini_, (Duse), 80.
Frank, Waldo, 66, 221.
Frankfort Opera House, 32, opp. 32.
Frankfort Schauspielhaus, 51, 55;
(Acting company), 88-89; 112, opp. 112, opp. 114.
Freie Volksbühne, 110;
see Volksbühne.
_Frères Karamazov, Les_, (Copeau-Jouvet), 25, 66, 103, 104, 173, 174,
opp. 174, 176, 179.
_Frogs, The_, 92.
_From Morn to Midnight_, (Simonson), 78.
Furttenbach, Joseph, 199.
Galli-Bibiena, 120, 126.
Galsworthy, John, 6, 7, 24.
Garrick, David, 23, 92, 100.
Garrick Theater (New York), 173, 180.
_Gas_, (Linnebach), 73.
Geddes, Norman-Bel, 159, 194.
Gémier, Firmin, 159, 200.
_Getting Married_, 193.
Globe Theater (London), 120.
Goethe, 6, 45, 117, 121, 188.
Goldsmith, Oliver, 193.
Gontcharova, Natalia, 124.
Gorky, Maxim, 107, 191.
Gozzi, C., 117, 188.
Grabbe, C. D., 73, 88, 131, 133, 137.
Grasso, Giovanni, 98, 104.
Greek Theater (Berkeley, Cal.), 194.
Grieg, Edward, 54.
Grosses Schauspielhaus (Berlin), vii, 53, 55, 109, 110, 111, 115,
116, 164-170, opp. 164, opp. 168, 176, 177, 182, 189, 200, 204,
209-210, 216.
Grossi and Coquette, 203.
_Grumpy_, 83.
Grünewald, Isaac, 121-123, opp. 120, 122.
Guthrie, Rev. Wm. N., 218.
_Hairy Ape, The_, 5, 21, 29, 38.
_Hamlet_, 24;
(Reinhardt-Stern), 110, 111, 168; 192, 208.
Hartau, Ludwig, 89.
Hasait, Max, 60, 61, 65, 72, 74, 116.
Hasenclever, Walter, 32, 33, 63.
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 5, 86, 162.
_He Who Gets Slapped_, (Pitoëff), opp. 24, 25; 98;
(Simonson), 133.
Hebbel, 168.
Heims, Elsa, 82.
Heinrich, Sebastien, 186, 187.
Heinz, Wolfgang, 89.
Herford, Beatrice, 102.
Herterich, 84.
Hettner, Otto, 65.
Hilar, K. H., 34.
Hindemith, Paul, 32.
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 116, 121.
Hoftheater (Munich), see Munich National Theater.
Hopkins, Arthur, 14, 44, 129.
Howard, Eugene, 204.
Howard, Willie, 204.
Hume, Sam, 194.
Ibsen, Henrik, 6, 27, 29, 41.
_Idle Inn, The_, 94.
Ingalls, H. C., 46.
Inner proscenium, 64, 73.
_Insect Comedy, The_, (Hilar-Capek), 34-36.
International Theater Exhibition (Amsterdam and London), ix, x.
Irving, Sir Henry, 121.
Jannings, Emil, 82.
Jansson, Thorolf, 121.
Jaques-Dalcroze, see Dalcroze.
_Jenseits_, (Linnebach), 33, 63, 73.
Jessner, Leopold, vii, 78, 80, 88, 89, 119, opp. 126, opp. 128, opp.
130, opp. 132, opp. 134, 130-143, opp. 136, opp. 138, opp. 140,
opp. 142, opp. 144, opp. 146, 147, 154-155, 175, 196.
_Jest, The_, 208.
Jolson, Al, 101.
Jones, Inigo, 120.
_Josephine_, 192.
Jouvet, Louis, 103, 104, 174, opp. 174, 176, 177, 180, opp. 180, 181,
182, 204.
Joyce, James, 66.
_Judith_, 168-169, opp. 168.
_Julius Cæsar_, (Reinhardt-Stern), 168; 193.
_Kain_, (Roller), 56.
Kaiser, Georg, 7, 32, 78.
_Kaiser Heinrich VI_, (Linnebach), 73.
Kamerny Theater (Moscow), 104.
Kammerspielhaus (Berlin), 46.
Katchaloff, V. I., 11.
Kaufman, Oskar, 45, 46, 146.
Kellerhals, Richard, 86, 87, 102.
Kemble, Chas., 23.
Klein, Cesar, opp. 126.
Knipper, Mme. O. L., 11, 12-13.
Kokoschka, Oskar, 32-33.
Konstantin, Leopoldine, 82.
Kortner, Fritz, 89, 139-141.
Krauss, Werner, 189.
Kraussneck, Arthur, 89.
Krehan, Hermann, 196.
Kummer, Clare, 192.
Künstler Theater (Munich), 46, 85, 193, 203.
_Kuppelhorizont_, see Dome.
Lauder, Harry, 103.
Lautenschläger, Karl, 58.
Ledebur, Leopold von, 89.
Leffler, Heinrich, 55.
Lehman, Elsa, 82.
Leithner, Melitta, 88.
Le Maire, Geo., 204.
Lert, Ernst, 33.
Le Goff, Jean, 180.
Lessing Theater (Berlin), 55.
Lindberg, Per, 111.
Lindsay, Vachel, 221.
Linnebach, Adolf, 33, 60, 63, 64, opp. 64, 65, 71, 72, 73, 74, opp.
76, 78, 116.
Lionel, 203.
Little Theater (New York), 193.
Littmann, Max, 45, 46, 85, 203.
_Living Corpse, The_, 84.
Lorensberg Theater (Gothenburg), 111.
_Lulu_, 28, 83;
see also _Erdgeist_ and _Pandora’s Box_.
Lydia _et_ Henry, 206.
_Lysistrata_, 192.
_Macbeth_, the opera, (André-Jansson), opp. 54, 55, 78, 79, 121.
Mack, Wm. B., 87.
MacKaye, Percy, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163.
MacKaye, Steele, 160-161.
Madison Square Garden (New York), 159.
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 8, 121.
_Magda_, 193.
Mallarmé, Stephane, 29.
Manet, E., 201.
_Maria Stuart_, (Weichert-Sievert), 54, 55, 88, 112, opp. 112, opp.
114.
_Marriage of Convenience, A_, 192.
_Marriage of Figaro, The_, _frontispiece_, 184, 186, opp. 186, 188,
189, 190.
Marionettes, 73.
_Masque of St. Louis, The_, (MacKaye-Smith), 159, 161.
_Masse-Mensch_, (Fehling-Strohbach), vii, 34, 53, 55, 62, 72, 80, 90,
144-156, opp. 148, opp. 150, opp. 152, opp. 154, opp. 156, 196,
208-209, 211.
_Master Builder, The_, 28.
Matisse, Henri, 38.
Maugham, Somerset, 192.
Medrano, see Cirque Medrano.
_Merchant of Venice, The_, (Reinhardt), 111; 207-208, opp. 208.
_Meistersinger, Die_, (Roller), 55, 56, opp. 56.
Mérimée, Prosper, 179.
_Midsummer Night’s Dream, A_, (Reinhardt), 110, 192.
Miller’s Theater, Henry (New York), 193.
Milne, A. A., 192.
_Miracle, The_, (Reinhardt-Stern), 110.
_Misanthrope, Le_, 117, 171, 188.
Mitchell, Grant, 17.
Moissi, Alexander, 82, 111, 139, 189, 200.
Molière, 23, 100, 117, 120, 188, 192.
_Molluso, The_, 192.
_Mörder Hoffnung der Frauen_, (Lert-Sievert), 32-33, opp. 32.
Morgan, J. P., 220.
Moscow Art Theater, vii, 8, opp. 10, 11-16, 25, 28, 83, 90, 97, 102,
158, 192.
Motion Pictures, 216.
Mozart, 73.
Müller, Gerda, 88, 89.
Munich National Theater, opp. 64, 65, 76, opp. 76, 85;
(Acting company) 86-87.
_Murderer, Hope of Women_, see _Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen_.
_Musik und die Inscenierung, Die_, 68.
Müthel, Lothar, 89.
_Napoleon_, (Jessner-Klein), 88, opp. 126, 131, 132, 133-134,
135-136, 136-137, 139.
National Theater (Munich), see Munich National Theater.
_Night Lodging_, 110, 191.
_Neue Schaubühne, Die_, 33.
Neues Volkstheater (Berlin), 145.
New York Theater Guild, see Theater Guild.
_Oberon_, (Hasait), 73.
_Œdipus-Rex_, (Reinhardt-Stern), 110, 115, 162, 165, 168.
Œttly, Paul, 180.
O’Neill, Eugene, 5, 21, 29, 37.
_Orestes_, (Reinhardt), 162.
Orska, Marie, 83.
_Orpheus in the Underworld_, (Reinhardt-Rée), 107-110.
_Othello_, (Jessner-Pirchan), 72, opp. 128, opp. 130, 131, 132, opp.
132, opp. 134, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141.
Pallenberg, Max, 82, 83, 189, 200.
_Pandora’s Box_, 28, 83.
Parrish, Maxfield, 55.
Pasetti, Leo, opp. 64, 65, opp. 76.
_Path of the Russian Stage, The_, 99.
Pavloff, P. A., 11, 13.
_Peer Gynt_, 54, 55, 88, 113.
_Penthesilea_ (Reinhardt-Stern), 55.
Permanent setting, 64, 104, 159, 184-197, 207.
Phillips, 71.
Picasso, Pablo, 6, 38, 214.
Pinero, Sir A. W., 6.
Pirchan, Emil, opp. 60, 119, 131, opp. 126, opp. 128, opp. 130, opp.
132, opp. 134, opp. 136, opp. 138, opp. 140, opp. 142, opp.
144, opp. 146.
Pitoëff, Georges, opp. 24, 25, 53, 125, opp. 124, 127.
Plymouth Theater (New York), 193.
Podium, 63, 126, 196, 213.
Poelzig, Hans, 109, 116, 166-167, 168.
Ponto, Erich, 90.
Portal, see Inner proscenium.
Price, Georgie, 97.
Prices of admission, 50.
Prinzregenten Theater (Munich), 46, 85, 203.
Projected scenery, 72-78.
_Prunella_, 192.
Prussian State Opera House, see Berlin State Opera House.
Prussian State Schauspielhaus, see Berlin State Schauspielhaus.
_Pygmalion_, (Linnebach), 25, 64, 88.
Rachel, Elisa, 100.
Racine, 192.
_Redemption_, (Hopkins-Jones), 84.
Redoutensaal (Vienna), frontispiece, vii, viii, 25, 56, 66, 117, 126,
176, 177, 184-197, opp. 186, opp. 190, 204, 205, 207, 210, 211,
216.
Rée, Max, 108.
Reinhardt, Max, 25, 30, 32, 42, 44, 46, 50, 55, 56, 58, 59, 82,
107-111, opp. 108, 112, 113, 115-117, 118, 119, 121, 125, 129,
130, 149, 159, 160, 162-170, 186, 188, 189, 190, 199, 200, 209,
216.
Religion and the theater, 170, 215-222.
Repertory system, 49-50.
Residenz Theater (Munich), 85.
Revolving stage, 58-59, 61-62, 213.
_Rheingold, Das_, (Hasait), 62, 65;
(Linnebach-Pasetti), opp. 64, 65, 76, opp. 76.
_Richard III_ (Jessner-Pirchan), 53, 80, 131, 134, 136, opp. 136,
137-142, opp. 138, opp. 142, opp. 144, opp. 146.
Richardson, Dorothy, 66.
_Ring vs. Rang_, 46.
Rodin, August, 137, 140, 182.
Roerich, Nicolas, 57.
Rolland, Romain, 110, 167.
Roller, Alfred, 44, 47, 55, 56, opp. 56, 57, 189-190.
_Romeo and Juliet_, (Reinhardt), 111;
(Lindberg), 112, 192, 194.
Roscius, 100.
_Rosmersholm_, 193.
Rosse, Herman, 159.
Royal Swedish Opera, see Swedish Opera.
_R. U. R._ (Hilar-Capek), 36-37.
_Rundhorizont_, 71.
_Sabine Women, The_, 192.
St. Martin’s Theater (London), 193.
Salle des Machines, La (Paris), 66.
Salzburg Festspielhaus, 107, 116.
_Samson and Delilah_, (André-Grünewald), 77, 121-123, opp. 120, opp.
122.
_Samson and Delilah_ (the play), 94.
Sandburg, Carl, 221.
_Saturday Evening Post, The_, 220.
Savry, Albert, 181.
Saxon State Schauspielhaus, see Dresden Schauspielhaus.
Schaeffer, Rudolph, 194.
_Schatzgräber, Der_, opp. 60.
Schauspielhaus (Berlin), see Berlin State Schauspielhaus.
Schauspielhaus (Dresden), see Dresden Schauspielhaus.
Schauspielhaus (Frankfort), see Frankfort Schauspielhaus.
Schiebebühne, see Sliding stage.
Schildkraut, Rudolf, 82.
Schinkel, C. F., 45, 120.
_School for Scandal, The_, 192.
Schwabe, 71, 74.
_Seagull, The_ (Pitoëff), 25, 28.
Selwyn Theater (New York), 193.
Semper, G., 45.
Senders, 84.
Shadow-marionettes, 73.
Shakespeare, Wm., 6, 22, 23, 24, 53, 87, 93, 100, 110, 120, 121, 134,
137, 140, 141, 161, 181, 192, 193, 199, 209, 212.
Shaw, G. B., 8, 25, 73, 193.
Shelley, 6, 207.
Siddons, Mrs., 23, 100.
Sievert, Ludwig, opp. 32, 33, 51, 112-119, opp. 112, opp. 114,
123-124.
Simonson, Lee, 73, 76, 77, 133, 194.
Sinking stage, 60, 61, 62, 63-64, 65, 66.
_Six Cylinder Love_, 96.
Sky-dome, see Dome.
Sliding stage, 58, 59-61, 65.
Sophocles, 110, 159, 162.
Spectatorium (Chicago), 161.
_Spook Sonata, The_, 28;
(Munich), 30-31.
_S. S. Tenacity, The_, (Copeau), 25, 84, 104, 105, 178, 179.
Staatsoper (Berlin), see Berlin State Opera House.
Staatsoper (Vienna), see Vienna Opera House.
Stanislavsky, C. S., 8, opp. 10, 11, 13, 14, 94, 95, 121, 158.
State Opera House (Dresden), see Dresden Opera.
State Opera House (Berlin), see Berlin State Opera House.
State Schauspielhaus (Berlin), see Berlin State Schauspielhaus.
State Schauspielhaus (Dresden), see Dresden Schauspielhaus.
_Stella_, 117, 188.
Stern, Ernst, 44, 47, 48, 55, 57, 58, opp. 108, 109, 118, 119, 125,
167, 189.
Strauss, Richard, 116, 146.
_Strife_, 209.
Strindberg, August, 27-28, 29, 31, 32, 42, 51, 107.
Strnad, Oskar, 199.
Strohbach, Hans, opp. 44, 119, 148, opp. 148, 149, opp. 150, opp.
152, opp. 154, opp. 156.
Ström, Knut, 111, 125.
_Sturm, Der_, 29.
Sudraka, 88.
_Sumurûn_, (Reinhardt-Stern), 44, 82, 108, 159.
_Sunken Bell, The_, 55.
_Swanwhite_, 28.
Swedish Opera (Stockholm), viii, opp. 54, 55, 74, 75, 108, opp. 120,
opp. 122.
Szukalsky, Stanislas, 183.
Talma, F. J., 100.
_Taming of the Shrew, The_, 86, 102.
Tchehoff, Anton, 8, 11, 25, 28, 29.
Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier (Paris), viii, 55;
(Acting company), 103-105, 106, 159, 171-183; opp. 174; opp. 180;
(Acting company), 178-183; 188, 200, 207, 209, 210.
Theater Guild (New York), 73, 78, 133.
Theater in dem Redoutensaal (Vienna), see Redoutensaal.
Theater of Dionysus (Athens), 211.
Theater of the Five Thousand, The, 115, 162, 170, 199.
_Theater of the World, The_, 216, 218.
Thomas, Augustus, 7.
_Three Sisters, The_, 94.
Toller, Ernst, 144, 146, 147, 154, see _Masse-Mensch_.
_Towards Damascus_, 28;
(Kerb-Sievert), 51, 56, 123-124.
Toy Theater (Boston), 171.
Treszler, 84.
_Traum, ein Leben, Der_, opp. 44.
_Trojan Women, The_ (Browne), 171.
_Troubador, Der_, 56.
Truex, Ernest, 96.
_Truth, The_, 192.
_Truth About Blayds, The_, 194.
_Turandot_, 117, 188.
_Twelfth Night_ (Copeau-Jouvet), 103, 104, 180-181, 192, 194.
_Ubermarionette_, 19.
Ulmer, Friedrich, 87.
_Uncle Vanya_, opp. 124.
Van Gogh, Vincent, 38.
_Vasantasena_, (Hettner), 64, 88, 89, 90.
_Vatermord_, 29-30.
Verden, Alice, 88.
Verdi, G., 55, 78.
_Versunkene Glocke, Die_, 168.
Vetter, President, 117, 186, 187.
Vienna Opera House, opp. 56, 185, 186, 188.
Vieux-Colombier, see Théâter du Vieux-Colombier.
Vildrac, Charles, 84.
Volksbühne (Berlin), viii, opp. 44, 46, 47, 55, 62, 72, 90, 144-146,
148, 152, 153, 155, see illus. of _Masse-Mensch_.
Volksoper (Berlin), 145.
Wagner, R., 45, 68, 69.
Wagon stage, 61.
Washington Square Players, 56.
_Wauwau, Der_, 83.
_Weavers, The_, 192, 209.
Weber, 73.
Weber, Joe, 204.
Wedekind, Frank, 28-29, 32, 83, 84, 107.
Wegener, Paul, 82.
Weichert, Richard, 88, 112-115, opp. 112, opp. 114, 119.
_When We Dead Awaken_, 28.
Wilbrand, 84.
_Wild Duck, The_, 28.
Wilde, Oscar, 192, 209.
Wilfred Thomas, 76.
_Wilhelm Tell_, (Linnebach), 73.
_Will of Song, The_, (MacKaye-Barhart-Jones), 159, 161.
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 159.
_W. U. R._, see _R. U. R._
_Zauberflöte_, (Hasait), 73.
Transcriber’s Notes
pg xv Changed: A Pitoëff Produtction
to: A Pitoëff Production
pg 111 Changed: Gothenburg, the commerical city of Sweden
to: Gothenburg, the commercial city of Sweden
pg 125 Changed: for Rinehardt there was always
to: for Reinhardt there was always
pg 188 Changed: while he was makng preparations
to: while he was making preparations
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