Continental stagecraft

Prophecy is a risky business in the theater, especially when prophecy concerns itself with personalities rather than tendencies. I find it very difficult to bring myself to say that the man who will become the leader of the new forces in the Continental theater is Jürgen Fehling, director of Masse-Mensch. And yet—on the basis of a single production—the temptation to believe something of the kind is strong indeed.

Fehling’s work is closely associated with two striking phenomena. One is the Volksbühne, the workingman’s theatrical organization of Berlin, which maintains the handsomest and best devised theater in the German capital; and the other is the play which has been given there with such uncommon success, Masse-Mensch, a strange and powerful tragedy of the “social revolution of the twentieth century” written by a communist leader, Ernst Toller.

The Berlin Volksbühne is interesting enough in itself. As the only organization that has been able to produce successfully this expressionist tragedy of communism, its power and position seem highly significant. This society of proletarian playgoers was founded more than thirty years ago as a sprouting bed for naturalistic drama and the social thesis-play. To-day it still cultivates the best in Realism and in the social drama, but it looks condescendingly on the thesis-play, and it gives the most completely artistic and successful example to be seen in Germany of an expressionist play and an expressionist production.

The Volksbühne has always had a double policy—that of buying out performances of good plays and retailing the seats to its members for much less than the box office prices, and that of producing plays itself. It began with a few Sunday performances of both kinds, and steadily grew in membership to the point where it buys all the Sunday matinees at a number of theaters, has two playhouses of its own, the Volksbühne and the Neues Volkstheater, and is organizing an opera house, the Volksoper. One hundred and eighty thousand men and women of the lower and lower-middle classes subscribed in 1922 for eight productions, either at the society’s theaters or at the playhouses with which it deals.

The Volksbühne itself is rather an extraordinary theater. Its striking front, with the words Die Kunst dem Volke upon its pediment, rises across a street that cuts through the workingmen’s quarter of Berlin, and, after a slight bend, crosses the Spree and becomes Unter den Linden. From above its little triangle of park, the Volksbühne stares ironically and, doubtless, a little proudly down the long street that passes the hideous art galleries of the Prussian government, the palaces once occupied by the Hohenzollerns, the State Opera, where royalty turned its back upon Richard Strauss, and runs on to the Brandenburger Tor of Imperial memories. The theater has the grimly noble air of the best of German architecture. In its auditorium Oskar Kaufmann has turned from the austerity of gray stone to the richness of red mahogany. The working class audiences of the Volksbühne find themselves seated, therefore, in the handsomest and doubtless the most costly auditorium of Berlin when they come to see the play which might almost be the story of their own defeat in the communist risings of 1919.

Masse-Mensch itself is a play, half dream and half reality, in which is pictured the conflict of Masse, the masses, against Mensch, the individual, of violent revolution against passive strike. Its drama pleads piteously for the sacredness of human life and the equal guilt of the State or the revolution that takes it. Because it was written by Ernst Toller, who, as he wrote it, lay in a Munich jail serving a twenty-year sentence for his part as Minister of Justice in the red rebellion which followed the assassination of Kurt Eisner by the reactionaries, Masse-Mensch is pretty generally taboo in German theaters. In the first six months after its première at the Volksbühne (29th September, 1921) it was played about seventy times, a very great number of performances in repertory. But upon its production in Nuremberg riots interrupted the first performance, and it was never repeated.

To the significance of the play itself and the proletarian organization which flings it in the face of a Germany where monarchists and republicans, socialists and communists, State and cabals, murder with almost equal recklessness, must be added a truly remarkable type and quality of production. It bears a certain relation to the work of Jessner at the State Schauspielhaus, where, by the way, Fehling is now to be employed. It is absolutely free of Realism and representation—as all expressionist production must be. It reduces setting to less than symbol, to what is hardly more than a convenient platform for the actor. It uses light arbitrarily.

Masse-Mensch is a piece in seven scenes. The first, third, fifth and seventh are actual; the others are dream-pictures. In the first scene Toller’s stage directions call for “The rear room of a workingman’s meeting hall. On the white-washed walls, portraits of leaders of the people and photographs of union delegates. In the center a heavy table, at which a woman and two workmen are seated.” The stage directions for the second scene, or first dream-picture, read: “Indicated: The hall of a stock exchange. At the desk, a clerk; about him, bankers and brokers.”

The playwright felt keenly the possibilities of the modern, subjective methods of productions, or he would not have used the word, “indicated.” He did not feel them clearly enough, however, to risk more than their application to the dream-pictures. But, taking “Indicated” as a key-word, Fehling has boldly ventured to apply abstract and expressionist methods to the whole of this thoroughly expressionist play. In the first scene, for instance, as you see it at the Volksbühne, there is no hall, there is no desk, there are no portraits. There is nothing but a deep box of high black curtains, and in the center a very low, broad platform. Upon this platform, spotted out with three shafts of light, are the two men and the woman in the taut attitudes of wrestlers as they clasp hands, the woman in the middle. For the dream scene, the stage is again in black curtains, but those at the rear are occasionally opened to show a clerk on an impossibly high stool, writing on an impossibly high desk, almost in silhouette against the yellow-lighted dome. A few steps lead down into the darkness of the front stage. Fehling and his stage designer, Hans Strohbach, pursue the same general method in the succeeding scenes. The “real” episodes are set in black curtains and with steps of one sort or another; they are lit by obvious beams of light, and they are given no more color than shows in the woman’s severe blue dress and one glimpse of the yellow dome. The dream-pictures are more elaborately staged, though they seem quite bare by the standard of our productions. The curious part is that the scenes of reality are more expressionistic, considering their purpose, than the dream-pictures. Reality is made of nothing but abstract plastic shapes, harsh, and harshly lit. Dreamland is sometimes painted and shaped in the slightly decorative spirit of Expressionism, and it is lit with beauty and atmosphere.

The effective arrangement of Strohbach’s scenes, and the powerful use which Fehling makes of them stamp the physical side of this production with distinction. Spiritually it is even more distinguished because of the rightness of vision with which Fehling interprets the play, and the brilliance with which he handles, not only the individual acting, but a chorus of united voices, which speaks through many scenes with an extraordinary clarity and emotion.

From the beginning of the first scene the actors strike the note of intensity and conviction, both as players and as characters, which they are to carry through the whole performance. Mary Dietrich, once of Reinhardt’s company, plays superbly the woman protagonist of the strike and of humanity. From the moment when her husband comes to her in the name of love to ask her to give up the leadership of the strike, which will begin next day, Dietrich drives with such furious precision at the meaning of this woman that she stands out immediately as a sort of Christ-figure. In the beginning she must give up all; she must leave home and love, to follow her call. In the end she must go to the scaffold rejecting all means of escape. It is one of the distinctions of this play, as well as of Dietrich’s playing, that this reference to Christ is so beautiful and so sure, yet so reticent.

The second scene, the dream-picture of a stock exchange, is a foreboding and dread satire. The bankers and brokers bid up human souls in the war that is under way, and make plans for an international corporation, which, posing as a founder of homes for convalescent soldiers, will open brothels for the troops. The woman appears in her dream, and makes a vain appeal to the humanity of these men. The bankers hear only the announcement of a mine accident and plan a benefit dance, beginning with a fox-trot by the brokers around the stage.

The third scene is the labor meeting at which a decision is to be taken on action to stop the making of munitions and end the war. Here again, Fehling throws the author’s realistic stage directions overboard (much, be it said, to the author’s pleasure). Instead of a hall, there is again blackness, emptiness. Out of the emptiness speaks a marvelous choral voice, the voice of the masses, measured, vibrant, intense:

Nothing like this voice, coming out of a darkness in which faces vaguely begin to hover, has been imagined, much less attempted, in our theater. The lights rise—or it would be more accurate to say, shoot down—upon the men and women workers standing in an irregular lozenge shape upon steep steps, which spread to the curtains at each side. Out of this crowd, in chorus and singly, come pleas for action, and visions of suffering which sweep the audience with emotion. The woman cries for a strike against war and against capital. Behind her rises The Nameless One, the bastard of War, to cry for armed revolt. His passion sweeps the masses, and the woman submits.

The fourth scene, another dream-picture, envisages her fears for the course of the revolution, her intuition that it will only breed a new violence, the violence of the proletariat. Below great, crooked, towering walls, guards hang over green lanterns. They sing ribald songs of their miseries. The Nameless One enters, and, standing in the middle, plays wildly on a concertina, while the guards and the condemned dance the dance of death about him. The sky lights up on a sudden in crimson, then pulses in and out; colors flood down over the moving figures in waves that throb with the music. Among the condemned is the husband of the woman. She tries to save him, as she would save all men from violence. Her pleas are useless. She stands with him before the firing squad as the curtain falls.

The fifth scene, the tremendous scene of the play and the production, is the rally at the workers’ headquarters in the face of defeat. The stage is again boxed in black. There are steps like the corner of a pyramid rising up to the right of the audience. Upon these steps gather the working people. You see a host, affrighted and cowering, in the twenty-four men and women who stagger upon the steps singing The Marseillaise. As they sway, locked together hand in hand, like men on a sinking ship, and the old song mounts up against the distant rattle of machine guns, the scene brings the cold sweat of desperate excitement to the audience that fills the Volksbühne, and to comfortable, purse-proud Americans as much as to men who have fought in the streets of Berlin. Suddenly there is a louder rattle of arms. The noise sweeps through the air. It drives into the souls of the huddling men and women. They collapse, go down, fall in a tangled heap. The curtains at the left loop up suddenly. There in the gap against the yellow sky stand the soldiers. They arrest the woman, the woman whom the rebels were about to condemn for her opposition to their slaughter.

The sixth scene is a dream-picture of the woman in prison. There is a void, a misty, swimming emptiness. Upon a platform is the woman’s cell, a scarlet cage in which she can only kneel. About her stand guards, bankers, the ghosts of dead enemies. They accuse her. She answers. At last, out of the void rise the shapes of the masses, the imprisoned masses who have been betrayed by violence and by the woman who deserted them and cast her lot with violence. They move in a great circle of towering shadows that seem to hang in the emptiness of the sky, as they pass across the dome at the back of the stage. The guilt of the masses, the guilt of the individual, the guilt of the woman—they have filled the air with recrimination. The figures of the imprisoned masses stop suddenly in their round. They raise their arms. They cry: “We accuse!”

There is only the final scene left. It is in her cell. Again the black curtains; some narrow steps. The husband comes to bring her freedom. The Nameless One also, with a plan of escape through murdering the guards. She rejects both. She rejects the priest, accusing men of primeval sin. She goes to her death. And as she goes, two women prisoners sneak out into the light—to divide the clothes of this new Christ.

Schuldig! Guilty! Guilty! The word echoes through the play, echoes in the auditorium of the Volksbühne. All are guilty. All are sick with guilt. And none more than these sufferers in the slums of Berlin who must go to the theater to see in black curtains the picture of their guilt. The world goes through capitalism, debasing itself, driving terror, greed, cruelty into the place of love and understanding. It comes out in revolution, a corruption of the thing it cures. The Germans have been through capitalism with a vengeance, through materialism, through war, and through a revolution that blasted half the people and did not satisfy the rest. Here is the misery of capitalism, the misery of abortive revolution, the misery of defeat and black hunger. Berlin is in purgatory. And Berlin goes to Masse-Mensch. Before this play sit hundreds of quite ordinary men, who have only to hear some word shouted at them with the passion of this play, and they will leave the slow and loved routine of homes, and lie again behind sandbags on Unter den Linden. All this is a strange, terrible, and sweet thing to feel as you sit looking at the purgatory of those black curtains.

Toller and Fehling have made possible the realization of this intense situation between play and audience; Toller by writing straight at the heart of his public. His dialogue makes no pretense to the accidental rhythms of life. It speaks out plainly and simply and beautifully the passion of each character, the passions of the world. Fehling has driven Toller’s speeches just as directly at the public. He has made no pretense at actuality. He has put his actors forward as actors on an abstract stage; and you think of them only as living, intimate presences.

Comparison between Fehling and Jessner is inevitable. They are both working upon the newest problem of production, the problem of escaping from Realism to reality and to the theater. They both throw overboard every shred of actuality that stands in the way of inner emotional truth. Technically, Fehling is as insistent as Jessner on the abstract, the formal production as the means of giving the actor and his emotion vividly and completely to the audience. Fehling realizes as keenly as Jessner does how different playing-levels can help him in deploying and emphasizing his actors. He does not, like Jessner, use the same levels throughout a play. He creates new plastics as he needs them. His production is formal in principle, but he does not rely upon a stage of certain permanent forms. His lighting is abstract, like Jessner’s, paying no attention at all to actuality; but it is not so free or so wilful in changes. The lights make a definite pattern in each scene and stick to it throughout. The only sharp exception is the scene of the dance of the condemned. Fehling does not try to make his lighting a running gloss to the words of the play.

Fehling may be much over-praised by the emotion of Masse-Mensch; perhaps there is a something in the passion of the play which lights up these players and these playgoers of the Volksbühne, and brings forth a unique and unwilled emotion. But there seem to be certain qualities in this production which stamp the director as a man of imagination and power. Certainly Fehling has a large and healthful simpleness. He isn’t finicking over rudimentary explanations with lights and shadows and primary colors. He isn’t missing the quality of the play in an endeavor to create a thing of a single startling or novel tone. He is certainly winning from his actors a spiritual coöperation finer than any that we saw in Germany. He is unmistakably one of the leaders along new paths—a sure and challenging force.