Read Ebook: Continental stagecraft by Macgowan Kenneth Jones Robert Edmond Illustrator

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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 C?zanne, 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.

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.

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 , 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.

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.

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 Volksb?hne 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.

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 D?rer, Schongauer and perhaps Cranach, and D?rer 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 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 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 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.

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.

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 Lautenschl?ger 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 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.

LIGHT AS SETTING

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Andr?'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 Andr?'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 K?nstler 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.

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.

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 AEschylus 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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