Continental stagecraft

Perhaps the gladiators gave it a bad name. At any rate for twenty centuries men have hesitated to put anything more serious than a clown or an athlete in the middle of an audience. The Romans could hardly be called a timorous, a sensitive or a conventional people, yet even they never thought of presenting a play in an amphitheater. C. Curio, rich and reckless, celebrated the death of his father by building two great wooden theaters back to back, giving performances in both at the same time, then whirling the spectators about on turn tables, until they faced each other, and the two semicircles of seats joined and made one huge arena. But, though Curio was reckless of money and of the lives of his guests, he was careful of the esthetic proprieties. The actors performed in the theaters, and the animals in the arena.

So far as the feelings of the Drama can be learned, she did not approve of the way the Romans shoved her actors out of the old Greek orchestra, and crammed them into a shallow little box, which they called a stage. The first chance that the Drama had, she climbed down close to the people again, and played on the stone floor of the medieval churches. Even Shakespeare did not have the temerity to try to put her back in a box. It is said that there were rare times, as in some of the outdoor mysteries of the Middle Ages and while the pageant wagons carried the actors and their scenes into the squares of the English towns, when you might have found the Drama entirely surrounded by the hosts of her admirers. But some curious and perverse power seems to have schemed through the centuries to seize a decadent time like the Roman days or the last fifty years in modern Europe, and clap the Drama in a box. And to-day, when the Drama is bravely insisting on a little air and light, the power is still strong enough to keep the Drama’s liberators from placing her naked and unashamed in the center of her fellows. She is no longer a peepshow lure, but we still hesitate to treat her as a goddess.

Occasionally a theorist, who is as sick as the rest of us of the fourth wall convention, comes forward with some extraordinary proposal to put the audience in the middle of the drama. Furttenbach in the seventeenth century laid out a square theater with a stage in each corner. Oskar Strnad of Vienna wants to place a doughnut stage two thirds round the audience; and some Frenchman has advocated whirling the doughnut. Anything to distract the spectator from the drama; nothing to concentrate him upon it.

In the “Theater of the Five Thousand” devised by Max Reinhardt in Berlin, and in the imitation which Firmin Gémier launched at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris, the audience and the drama at last met in the circus. But for some curious reason—at which I have only guessed in a more or less absurd fashion—neither Reinhardt nor Gémier was courageous or far-seeing enough to use the circus as a circus. Neither dared put the players in the center, and forget the old stage. At one side there always lingered a palace or a proscenium.

Reinhardt might make the excuse that for such a scheme he needed a round circus, and that a round circus would be far too big for the drama. (He would not be absurd enough to say that Moissi or Pallenberg could not act unless all the audience saw all his face all the time). There are round circuses in Europe, however, and small, round circuses, and if Reinhardt could not find one in Berlin, he could have built one for half the money he put into reconstructing the Circus Schumann into the Grosses Schauspielhaus.

Up on Montmartre, just under the last heights on which perches Sacré Cœur, there is such a circus. An intimate circus, a little circus, just the place to begin the last experiment with the theater. Copeau could go straight there from the Vieux-Colombier, and throw his Scapin into the ring without a second’s hesitation. It would bowl over Paris and half the theatrical world.

Copeau could go straight there, but I think the audience should be required, for a time, to make a detour via the top of Montmartre. Certainly that is the only way to approach the Cirque Medrano to-day. A fiacre to the funicular. The funicular to the base of the cathedral. A stroll all round that boarded-up curiosity. A look-off at Paris swimming in the ebb-tide of the summer sun. Then supper in the Place du Tertre. Not for the food, which is as good as any cuisine bourgeoise; nor for the trees and window-groups out of Manet; nor for the tubby widow of forty-five who sings:

or the ancient with the two brass buttons in the back of his surtout and the patience of an English politician, who recites inaudible and probably unintelligible poetry before passing the hat. Supper in the Place du Tertre is an appropriate prelude to the Cirque Medrano because of the dog that watches all evening from the tin roof of an impossibly ruined house, and the women straight out of the French Revolution, the days of ’48 and the Commune, who stand about with their great naked arms akimbo, and their strong sharp chins, high cheek bones, and eagle eyes waiting for the liberty cap to crown them. The dog and the women, they are the audience and the show. They are the Cirque Medrano.

This circus is a golden bowl. At the bottom, no sawdust but a carpet of hemp, a great “welcome” doormat without the lettering; we take the deed for the word. Outside the ring is a parapet nicely carpeted in yellow; one of the clowns finds it amusing to roll round this track on his shoulders. Above the parapet rise steep rows of seats, half of them in bright orange for the spectators with fifty or sixty cents to spend. Higher up the thin and graceful pillars which support the roof cut across the vision a little; here there are only benches and the dévotés. At opposite sides of the ring, walled passages lead out to the greenroom and public entrances which circle underneath the seats. Exits for the audience pierce the rows at the four quarters. From the disk of the dome above, sixteen great lamps blaze down on the ring, and sometimes a spotlight or two punctuate the darkness.

If you like to take your pleasure sentimentally, a performance at the Cirque Medrano is like opening old letters—with a comic valentine now and then for tonic. Huck Finn saw a one-ring circus; but Gentry’s Dog and Pony Show is the farthest that the present generation ever get from the three-ring-and-two-stage monstrosity which deafens our ears and dulls our eyes.

The Cirque Medrano is the proper place for artists and connoisseurs. The fifteen hundred people that it holds can study—and do study—with the minute intensity of an anatomical clinic, M. Grossi and Coquette, as the horseman, quite as proud as his mare, puts her through five minutes of marching to music. They turn their eyes with just as much appreciation to watch the aerialists, plunging into their dangerous pastimes under the lights. Here M. Lionel, Roi du Vertige, gets the sort of attention he could never win on the vaudeville stage; it must seem to him sometimes, as he manœuvers gingerly on a chair balanced by its right hind leg in the neck of a bottle which is perched in turn on a ten foot pole, that the towering rows of seats are about to topple over on the strange career which he has made of himself.

There is no question, then, about the sight-lines of the theater which Copeau should make out of the Cirque Medrano. There never was such an auditorium for sheer visibility. The last rows are better than the first; they take in the whole audience as well as the show, while all you can say for the front seats is that they would show you half of the laughing or crying crowd of men and women, hanging over the actors in far from mute adoration. The slant of these seats is greater than the slant in Max Littmann’s theaters in Munich, but, because the rows swing all round, you never get that feeling of awful vacancy and gap which comes to spectators in the upper rows of the Prinzregenten and the Künstler Theaters in Munich. And there is no proscenium arch to press down upon the poor midgets at the bottom of the playhouse.

“But their backs? How about the actors’ backs?”

That is a foolish question from any one who has ever seen Copeau’s players, who has watched Jouvet’s back play the coarse, immense Karamazov, or seen his legs and buttocks send Aguecheek shuffling across the stage, or caught the whole quick poise of Suzanne Bing’s Viola in her shoulders and hips.

It is nothing short of the ravings of a mad man if the questioner has been to the Cirque Medrano, and looked upon the clowns. People have wondered how the actors of the Grosses Schauspielhaus could play to three audiences at once, the one in front, the one at the right, and the one at the left; here are the clowns playing to four. It is not all slapstick either. There is almost no whacking in the clowns’ own turns. In these scenes they work out broad little comedy skits such as Ray and Johnny Dooley, Leon Errol and Walter Catlett, Eddie Cantor and George Le Maire, Willie and Eugene Howard, or Weber & Fields might offer in our revues. The difference at the Medrano is that the actors seem to have consciously developed their gestures and their poses as supplementary expression to their faces. Also they warily work round during their scenes, and give each part of the audience the benefit of both back and face. The comedy of the Medrano is far funnier than the comedy of The Follies or the comedy of the Redoutensaal in Vienna; and not because the turns are broader. It is funnier because it is so intimately alive, because it is made with all the actor’s body, and because it is always directed at an audience. Four audiences at once! It is a priceless advantage. The actor has always some one to press his art upon. In our theater half an actor’s body is dead, or else vainly talking to the scenery. That is an understatement, if anything. The only way the actor can get directly at our audience, register upon it the impact of his art, his personality, his emotion, is to turn away from the scene and make his speech into a monologue. That is the chief difficulty which stands in way of the sort of acting which deals directly and frankly with the audience, which admits that it is art and not reality, which says that the actor is an actor and the audience is an actor, too; the kind of acting, in short, which is called presentational in contrast to the realistic method of representation which rules our theater. On any stage that is surrounded by its audience, the player can speak to his fellow-actor and to his audience at the same time. In the Medrano it is no question of backs or faces. The whole man plays, and every inch of him has an audience.

There remains, however, the question of setting. Clowns need no atmosphere, but Hamlet must speak to a ghost. An acrobat is his own scenery, but Juliet needs a balcony. Can the Medrano manage such things? Can this open ring do what the stage of the Redoutensaal balks at?

The Medrano can do almost anything that our theater can do—and a great many things more—because it can use the three essentials of setting and atmosphere: light, human bodies, and indications of place.

Light.... It is the fifth turn in the Cirque Medrano. Lydia et Henry, “Babies Dancers,” two pitiable little children, who have been taught to do very bad imitations of their elders in the banal dances of the revues. After they have hopped and shaken their way uncertainly through two or three fox trots and shimmies, the great lights in the roof go out. Blackness, then a stain of amber in the center of the ring. The light brightens and the stain lengthens. It might fall upon the stone of an old cistern, if some one had thought to put it there. Then, when the figure of Salome crawls out along the stain, it would be many moments before we could see that it was the body of a four-year-old, whom some one had togged out with breast-plates. Or again darkness, and slowly a blue-green light from on high, and in the midst of it an Apache and a girl. It needs no curb, no lamp-post, no brick corner, to make the ring a moonlit street.

After light, there comes the human body. The Medrano as a circus does nothing to show how the actors themselves can make a setting. Why should it? But I remember the project of an American artist, in 1914, to put The Cenci upon the stage of a prize ring, and I remember how the sketches showed a chorus of human figures in costumes and with staves, circling about the people of Shelley’s play and forming a dozen frames to the drama within.

After light and a setting of bodies comes just as much of the ordinary plastic scenery of the stage as you need, and just as little as you can get along with. If you care to dig a bit under the ring, and install machinery that will lower the floor in sections, pile up hills in concentric circles or even lift a throne or a well or an altar into the middle of the circus while the lights are out—well, there is nothing to prevent you. Juliet’s balcony may hang above one of the entrances; or in the center of the stage throughout the whole action of Les Fourberies de Scapin may stand the tréteau or block, which Copeau makes the center of the action at the Vieux-Colombier. Scenically the problem of the Medrano is the most fascinating problem of the stage artist, the creation of a single permanent structure, large or small, which can stand throughout a play and give significant aid to the various scenes.

It is no such difficult task to imagine productions in the Medrano as it is to find plays for the Redoutensaal. The accompanying sketch shows an arrangement for The Merchant of Venice. Glowing Venetian lanterns are hung in the spaces between the arches at the top of the theater. The four entrances for the public are made entrances for the players as well. Below each gate is a double stair, railed at the top with Venetian iron. Between the stairs are benches, again in the shape of the period. The railings become the copings of the Rialto. The casket scenes are played in the center of the arena, while Portia and Nerissa watch the proceedings from a bench at one side; another bench seats the judges in the courtroom. Jessica leans out from an entrance to flirt with her lover, and the carnival mob chases old Shylock up and down the little stairs, over the benches, round about and out one of the two lower gates to the ring.

The ghost scene in Hamlet? Imagine the sentinel’s companions moonlit in the center. Imagine a gallery behind the arches lighted with a dim and ghostly radiance. And imagine Marcellus suddenly and fearfully pointing to the figure of the dead man where it moves above the last row of spectators. No mixing of actors and audience, but what a thrill to see the ghost across a gulf of turned and straining faces, what a horror to see him over your own shoulder! Later Hamlet climbs stone by stone to meet and speak with the ghost from a platform above one of the great entrances.

The Jest—its prison scene? A block in the middle of the ring, a single glaring light from straight above, and the figure of Neri chained to the block.

Masse-Mensch? But a mob-play is too easy. The scene of the defeat, for instance; light upon the steps in the middle of the ring, workers piled up on it, messengers and refugees running in from gate after gate, from all four entrances, flinging themselves back on the crowd in the center as the news of fresh disaster comes. The rattle of firearms; lights against the back of the high gallery, and the silhouettes of a score of machine guns trained on the actors and the audience.

It would be foolish to deny that the Medrano is not a theater for every play. It could not hold some that the artificiality of the Redoutensaal would make welcome—Oscar Wilde’s, for instance—along with most of the conversational Realism of the past thirty years. But it could house all that the Grosses Schauspielhaus is fitted for—Greek tragedy and comedy, Shakespeare’s greatest plays, dramas like Florian Geyer, The Weavers, and Danton. Some of the scenes of such pieces, the intimate episodes which Reinhardt’s circus balks at, could be done excellently in the Medrano. It has all the intimacy of Copeau’s theater, and it could bring into its ring many dramas of to-day,—The Emperor Jones, Strife,—which are impossible in the Vieux-Colombier. The Medrano has its limitations, of course, but they are not the limitations of size, emotion, or period. The plays that it could not do would be the plays least worth doing, at their best the plays which give to a reader almost all that they have to give.

If you should try to make a comparison of method, rather than of limitations, between the three active presentational theaters of Europe, and the fourth that might be, it would run, I think something like this: The Grosses Schauspielhaus tries to deceive you in curious ways,—with dome and scenery and cloud machine. The Vieux-Colombier carefully explains to you that this is a theater, and that this is also life. The Redoutensaal asks you to dress up and see something artistic. The Medrano unites you and overwhelms you.

The thing that impresses any one who studies the Medrano from the point of view of play production—it may even impress the reader who tries to understand and sympathize with these attempts to suggest how plays might be produced there—is the great variety which such a theater offers and always the sense of unity which it creates. From every angle relationships center upon the actor, or cut across one another as he moves about, makes entrances or exits, or appears in the back of the audience. All these relationships work to a fine, natural unity. There is the actor in the center with the audience about him; there is the actor on the rim drawing the audience out and across to him. There are three circles of action within one another in a single unity. And there is the sense of all this which the audience has as it looks down, Olympian, from its banks of seats.

Something of the vision of the aeroplane invades the Medrano. We see life anew. We see it cut across on a fresh plane. Patterns appear of which we had no knowledge. Relationships become clear that were once confusion. We catch a sense of the roundness and rightness of life. And in the Medrano, while we win this vision in a new dimension, we do not lose the feel of the old. Such a theater establishes both for us. It gives us the three unities of space in all their fulness. They cut across one another like the planes of a hypercube. And the deeper they cut, the deeper grows the unity.

The Medrano seems to solve two problems of the modern theater. These arise from two desires in the leading directors and artists. One is to throw out the actor into sharp relief, stripped of everything but the essential in setting. This motivates a production like Masse-Mensch, with black curtains blotting out all but the center of the stage, and a theater like the Redoutensaal, with the actor placed amidst a background of formal and permanent beauty. The Medrano supplies a living background, the background of the audience itself. It is the background of life instead of death, a fulness of living things instead of the morbid emptiness of black curtains. It is a background more enveloping and animating than the ballroom of Maria Theresa. It is a background that accords with every mood, and is itself a unity.

The other problem is a psychological and a physical problem, the problem of life-principles in art. In the beginning the theater was masculine. Its essence was a thrust. The phallus was borne in the processional ritual at the opening of the Theater of Dionysus each spring; and its presence was significant. The greatest and the healthiest of the theaters have always plunged their actors into the midst of the audience. It is only decadence, whether Roman or Victorian, that has withdrawn the actor into a sheath, a cave, a mouth, and has tried to drag the spirit of the spectator in with him. The peep show is essentially evil. I will not say it is feminine, but I will say that the art of the theater is a masculine art, that it is assertive and not receptive. Its business is to imbue the audience. It is not too difficult to see in the proscenium arch the reason for the barrenness of the realistic theater. Directors and artists who have felt this have tried to find a playhouse that lies nearer to the masculine vigor of Æschylus and Shakespeare. I think they can find it in the Cirque Medrano.