Continental stagecraft

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?