Continental stagecraft

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.