Continental stagecraft

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.