Continental stagecraft

CHAPTER I
BEYOND REALISM

It is a pity to begin a book by being dull. But a time of change is upon us in the theater, and a time of change is a time for definitions.

We have passed through such times before, and we have come out after some years—a century or so—with categories neatly fixed. We can look back along the history of English literature and place a judicial finger there and there and there and say Middle English, Classicism, Romanticism. All this is pretty well set. Then we come to Realism and its quagmires—quagmires of balked creation and quagmires of discussion—and we wallow about gesticulating and shouting and splashing the mud into our immortal eyes. What is this bog we have been so busy in? And what is the fitful and rather blinding storm of illumination which plays about the horizon and calls itself Expressionism?

Of course these things are just what we care to make them. Various parties to the argument choose various definitions—the kinds that suit their themes. I claim no more for mine than that they will make clear what I am talking about, and save a certain amount of futile dispute.

There are plenty of sources of confusion in discussions about art. To begin with, it is not an easy thing to limit a dynamic organism by definition. Creative efforts in drama, fiction or painting run out of one category and into another with distressing ease. More than that, there are apt to be many parts to a whole, many divisions to a category; and the parts or the divisions can be extraordinarily different. Finally, fanatics and tea-table gossips are equally unscrupulous when it comes to “proving” a point. They make the definitions of friends and foes mean what they like. They take the part for the whole, the division for the category. They pin down a lively and meandering work of art at just the place where they want it. Two disputants, bent on exhibiting the more indecent side of human intelligence, can make the twilight of discussion into a pit of black confusion.

Let us bring the thing down to the present quarrel in the theater: the quarrel with Realism, which has moments of clarity; the quarrel with Expressionism, which is murky as hell.

What are we going to mean when we talk about Realism? So far as this book goes, the word Realism means a way of looking at life which came into vogue about fifty years ago. It sees truth as representation. It demands a more or less literal picture of people and happenings. It insists that human beings upon the stage shall say or do only those things that are reasonably plausible in life. Resemblance is not always its end, but resemblance is a test that must be satisfied before any other quality may be admitted. Realism is not, of course, a matter of trousers, silk hats, and machinery. The realistic attitude can invade the sixteenth century, as it does in Hauptmann’s Florian Geyer. Trousers, silk hats, and machinery can be the properties of a non-realistic play like O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape. The test of Realism, as the term is here employed, is the test of plausibility: Would men and women talk in this fashion in real life under the conditions of time, place, and action supplied by the playwright? It is the business of the realistic playwright to draw as much as possible of inner truth to the surface without distorting the resemblance to actuality.

There should not be a great deal to quarrel about in such a definition of Realism, though its adherents may deny hotly the natural assertion that the method of Realism is barren either in whole or in part. At any rate, people generally understand what the row is about, and the disputants can kick up only about so much dust on this battle-field. Non-realism is another matter.

That the thing is the opposite of Realism is obvious in just one respect: It does not admit the test of resemblance. It denies in the theater, as furiously as do the works of Cézanne or Picasso in the picture gallery, the validity of representation. But what will it substitute for the technique of Realism and what will it call the substitute? It will go back to romantic periods for a free technique, but it will look forward for its materials along paths which psychological research has lately opened to men and women outside the ranks of true poetic genius. By this it may arrive at the inner truth of Shelley and Goethe, Shakespeare and Æschylus, while it sacrifices the outer truth of Ibsen and Bataille, Pinero and Galsworthy. The question is both of technique and of materials, for an inner truth is to be found in a study of the unconscious mind which will not brook the obstructions of actuality and resemblance. Inner truth is so much more important than actuality that the new type of drama will not bother itself to achieve both, and if one must infringe on the other—which must happen in almost every case—then it chooses quickly and fearlessly the inner truth.

To give this anti-Realism a name involves confusions dear to the heart of the controversialist. To give it the name Expressionism multiplies these confusions. Yet it is hard to see any alternative at the moment. We must embrace the name—and the confusions.

The chief confusion is due to the fact that there are two kinds of Expressionism, as there are doubtless two kinds of Realism. There is the larger and there is the smaller. Realism can be a mere technique—resemblance; and it can also be a resemblance through which you catch a vision of the soul. Expressionism can be seen by the friends of Realism only as the narrow, neurotic, violent, and formless art which displays itself in the dramas of the new German writers like Georg Kaiser. I should be prepared to defend this sort of Expressionism against the Realism of Augustus Thomas or even of John Galsworthy; but I should not admit that it was the end of the reaction against resemblance. Expressionism may be applied—and for the purposes of this book it shall be applied—to the whole tendency against Realism, just as Romanticism is applied to the whole tendency against Classicism. Many who dislike Realism and neurotic German Expressionism equally, prefer to give the form they seek some such well-worn and inoffensive label as Poetry. This finickiness doesn’t matter—except as it admits new confusions and dodges the issue. This issue is plain and should be kept plain. Realism, in any but a very extraordinary sense, is a cramp upon art. Instinctively artists of the theater are beginning to recognize this and to seek some way out. This involves new qualities in the play. For practical purposes let us call the way of escape Expressionism. Some other term may establish itself in the course of years, but for the moment this is all we have.

It is fairly easy to apply these terms and definitions to the current theater—if you are not too doctrinaire or too partizan. Realism yawningly enfolds ninety-nine out of a hundred playwrights. Maeterlinck and D’Annunzio require a little special attention and Shaw and Barrie raise nice points. But, in general, the distinction holds; resemblance shepherds the realistic plays, emanations of the unconscious guide us to the expressionistic. Even the purely representational performances which most of our actors and directors give do not always succeed in hiding the cleavage.

The most startling and disturbing experience that any friend of Expressionism can have is to sit through a performance of Tchehoff’s The Cherry Orchard by the Moscow Art Theater—even by that portion of Stanislavsky’s celebrated company which was cut off by Wrangel’s army while playing in Southern Russia and compelled to tour Europe for two years before repatriation was possible. Here is a play of a generation ago written by the man whose dramas were the cornerstone of success for the world’s greatest realistic theater. It is a genre study almost without plot: decayed aristocrats, old servants, newly-rich peasants and the incident of the sale for debt of an ancestral property. There is no more violence in it than the violence of life which rots an oak. There is no more distortion than is to be expected in light reflected from the troubled surface of life. And it is played with an almost utter perfection of realistic detail, complete impersonation, and rounded ensemble.

Yet if this is Realism we have never known Realism in our theater. It carries us through life and out on the other side. It drenches us with a mystic sense of existence. And when we read the text of the play and separate it from the extraordinary emotional actuality of the performance, we discover again and again and again speech that drives straight at free expression instead of resemblance, and action and character permeated with an almost religious symbolism. All this fused by playwright and players into what seems a work of the most perfect resemblance, but what is actually only the appearance of appearance.

The surface of the play is the surface of life. Mme. Ranevsky has returned to her estates after a turmoil of years in France. There are the usual appendages: a daughter, an adopted daughter, a governess, a housemaid, a major-domo, and a man-servant who have grown into the life of the house, a brother, an old, impoverished friend, a village clerk with his eye on the maid-servant, an up-and-coming merchant whose grandfather was a serf on the estate. These people talk a great deal, and in talking they make certain matters plain. One of these is that no one can save the estate, the beautiful cherry orchard, from the consequences of the family temperament. Madame and her brother have always spent their money as becomes gentlefolk, and some one has forgotten the secret of how the cherries used to be dried and sent to the markets of the far cities every year. They flounder about in self-deception, always hoping for succor, never willing to accept the scheme of the friendly merchant for cutting the estate up into villa lots, and never able to do anything themselves to save it from the auctioneer. Ultimately the merchant buys it in, and in blissful callousness puts the ax to the trees as the family leave the old house. Out of these people and their dilemma rises the most curious and moving symbolism. A suggestion of symbols, rather; for there is nothing bald about it. Truths of Russian temperament, even Russian politics, are figured with the hidden yet revealing quality that so often rises out of life like an odor from old fields, freighted with memories and anticipations. Perhaps the simplest and most moving example of this comes at the very end of the play. Through it all has moved a mumbling, bent old man who has been the loving guardian of the household for two generations, one of those rare and ancient servants who, by sheer servility, have lifted themselves out of servantage and into a share in the family life. In the end, the house is sold, the furniture removed, the shutters closed. The family depart. Then into the dim room comes the old man, forgotten. He totters across to the derelict sofa that has been left behind. He curls up on it like some old leaf. There in the darkness he dies. The soul of old Russia.

As the old man dies something occurs that gives us all the license we need in order to see in other portions of the play methods and attitudes far indeed from Realism. The stage directions read: “A distant sound is heard, as if from the sky, and the sound of a string breaking, dying away, melancholy.” It is a sound that occurs also in the second act, unexplained, ominous. Symbolism. Arbitrary and very expressive sounds from heaven. Is it at all surprising to find the characters of this play indulging in lengthy accounts of their lives without taking the least trouble to find some stranger who might plausibly be ignorant of it all?

Perhaps this is Realism, perhaps not. Certainly it is both sharp with actuality and mystic with life’s intensity as these Russian players act it. The company did not contain the greatest of the group which Stanislavsky has gathered about him since he opened his theater in 1897. The director himself was not there to play the maundering brother. On this night Kachaloff was out of the cast. But Mme. Knipper, the widow of Tchehoff, played Mme. Ranevsky, and P. A. Pavloff played the old servant. How many of the other players acted parts long familiar to them I cannot say; but their work gave the impression not only of exceptionally fine individual performances but of an ensemble long and lovingly built up into perfection. It is an old cliché as well as a sad comment on acting as an art to say that a player does not play a character but literally is the character. In the case of this company from the Moscow Art Theater, there is a deep intensity in the performance and a frank desire for absolute impersonation which make such a comment on their playing of The Cherry Orchard the obvious and revealing truth. It is a comment that applies to the ensemble as much as to the individual acting.

The wedding of an utterly realistic performance with a play of mystic overtones is justified by the sense of an old and complete life which both possess. The intimacy of the actors with one another is as evident as the intimacy of the characters they play, and the intimacy of masters and servants in this Russian family. The welcome of the mistress on her return may be a matter of the clever rehearsal of off-stage noise—amazingly clever, you can believe; but when this adoration comes out of the wings and walks upon the stage, it is seen as the perfection of emotion and impersonation. A performance in so foreign a tongue as Russian gains because our eager imagination is at work to interpret in the acting the gaps left by the lack of words. It also loses, because the meaning of the play is not always there to show the linking of character and character, and of incident and incident; great spaces of action are blank and without emotion; we carry away fewer and shorter memories. How many and how continuous, however, are the memories of this performance, and how piercingly keen are the sharpest of them! Mme Knipper: a welling flood of emotion at the old nursery of her childhood; blind affection for the lovely, ancient orchard; childlike prodigality in her gesture as she scatters money that might once have saved the estate, followed by childlike penitence; and then the moment when she hears at last that the orchard is sold, when her ability to ignore and forget slips from her and she turns old before our eyes. Pavloff, prince of impersonators of old men, hobbling about the room; a bent and shuffling figure eternally mumbling, eternally nursing; a watery-eyed kiss for madame’s hand, a pat for the twisted collar of the brother, a touch to the turn of a curtain; an old, old, devoted shape speaking its fullness of character in every movement. Other figures almost as fully felt and seen. Each one doing the least little thing with an arresting significance. Here for once are actors who realize the importance of crossing a stage, as a display not of themselves but of their characters. Here, equally, are actors who have got by all the small egoisms of their kind. It is said that Stanislavsky found his players among artists, writers, students, shopkeepers, anywhere but in “the profession.” At any rate in twenty years he has made them into selfless but distinguished parts of a new organism. Their intimacy as people must be as great as the intimacy which they give their characters on the stage. They are an orchestra; their playing is a music, a harmony. They seem to have lived into this play in the eighteen years that they have given it until now they are part one of another. It does not matter that some may have had their rôles only five years, perhaps only five months. They are enveloped in the mother-liquor of this mature, well-aged performance. You recall the stew that Anatole France described: “To be good it must have been cooking lengthily upon a gentle fire. Clemence’s stew has been cooking for twenty years. She puts into the pot sometimes goose or bacon, sometimes sausage or beans, but it is always the same stew. The foundation endures; this ancient and precious foundation gives the stew the quality that in the pictures of old Venetian masters you find in the women’s flesh.”

Such Realism as this of the Moscow Art Theater compares most curiously with the best we know of realistic acting in the productions of David Belasco and Arthur Hopkins. It has the care and minutiæ of Belasco sharpened by far greater ability on the part of players and director, and mellowed by time. It has the naturalness of Hopkins; but, because it is secured by deliberate direction and not by the indirection of the American’s method, the naturalness fits into a general design and is never slipshod. (So far Stanislavsky denies life and its accidents!) It is, of course, worse than futile to compare such acting with our own for any purpose but understanding. We cannot achieve a performance of this kind so long as we have no permanent companies, no repertory system. It is not alone a matter of the leisurely method of production which Stanislavsky can employ,—months spent in study of the script, long readings and discussions over every character. Repertory keeps the actors playing a piece for years. They are not repeating themselves evening after evening with mechanical devotion. They come back to the play from other parts. They see it anew. If it is such a piece as The Cherry Orchard, they plunge into its depths with a sense of refreshment. They are the parts of a whole which they can never greatly alter, but which they can enrich by new contributions.

We have, then, in this performance an almost perfect example of minute and thorough Realism, fused into something beyond Realism through its union with a play distinctly expressionistic in certain qualities. It would be easy to see how frank, non-realistic acting could be applied to The Cherry Orchard. It is, in fact, very hard to see how the players can act some of the speeches as they do, notably the descriptions of themselves and their lives which the governess and Madame Ranevsky furnish to fellow-characters fully acquainted with all they say, characters who very rightly pay not the slightest heed. If ever a player had an opportunity to bridge directly the gap which has existed between stage and audience for the past fifty years, and to present emotion as simply and honestly and theatrically as do the gravestones in Spoon River, it is the actress who plays the governess. She begins the second act with the following speech, virtually a soliloquy, to which none of the others on the stage pay the least attention, even the attention of boredom:

Is this Realism? Is it Expressionism? Is it something between, some Realism of the Spirit opposed to the Realism of Flesh which we know? Can we say that we know true Realism of the Flesh as yet? Even if we do know it in a few fugitive productions, are we ready to give up not only such Realism but also the possibility of deeply moving performances like this of The Cherry Orchard, and to go seeking a fresh and debatable thing far on the other side of experience? If we are, it is because, we see that such perfection as this of The Cherry Orchard is a very rare thing for which we pay with hours of the commonplace, and because we recognize that when a play reaches such spiritual quality it has traveled so far from Realism that the journey is almost over.