Continental stagecraft

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.

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.

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.

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.