Continental stagecraft

There is something in the nature of the theater that makes Realism a natural and a thoroughly unsatisfactory method of expression. Its principal material, the actor, is too near actuality. It is no triumph of art to make a flesh-and-blood man named Grant Mitchell into a flesh-and-blood man named Andrew Lane. Especially when the heart of the whole business is an elaborate pretense that there really isn’t any actor, and there really isn’t any theater, and we are really looking through the fourth wall of a room in the next village.

Obviously no other art is so close to life or so quick with life’s vitality. Literature uses printed signs of a very arbitrary and formal nature, which we translate into words forming ideas and mental pictures, which, in turn, may suggest human beings and their emotions. Music employs sounds some of which faintly suggest bird-notes or the rumble of the heavens, but none of which comes within shouting distance of the human voice. Painting has pieces of canvas and lumps of colored clays, and these it arranges in patterns, through which, by custom and habit, we are able to gain an impression of a curiously flattened life. Even sculpture, literal as its rounded, three-dimensional shapes ordinarily are, must use the intermediary of clay or rock. The theater is the one art that works in the materials of life itself. It employs life to render life. Painting, architecture, and sculpture may supply a background to the actor, but the actor is the center of the play, and when he speaks the words of literature he speaks them as the actual human being from whom they are supposed to come.

The actor brings the theater far too close to life to please some of its great lovers. The actuality of the actor affrights them. Gordon Craig, once an actor and always a true partizan of the theater, has felt this. He has found the actor too much a piece of life, too much a creature of the emotions of existence, and too little an impersonal and dependable tool of the artist. “The actions of the actor’s body, the expression of his face, the sounds of his voice, all are at the mercy of the winds of his emotions.” He is not clay, he is not stone, he is not curves of ink, he is not arbitrary sounds produced from wood or brass. He is life itself, and a very irregular and undependable part of life. Therefore, says Craig, the thing that the actor gives us is not a work of art; “it is a series of accidental confessions.”

Now the contrast between the pliant and well-behaved clay and the intractable actor is interesting. And there is a certain significance in the fact that when Craig describes the work of the actor as a series of “accidental confessions,” he uses a phrase which would delight the harshest of the realists—the writers who practised Naturalism, the literal transcription of the irregularities of life. But the issue goes deeper. The actor is essential to the theater. He cannot be turned out for a glorified puppet, an Ubermarionette. But perhaps he can be told that he is far too near life and its accidents to spend his time imitating them. To give us life and its significance the dramatist, like workers in the other arts, needs an intermediary. If the actor is not a true intermediary, because he is a part of life, the dramatist has only to see that he can go beyond the actuality of the physical actor to Form. With the creative vitality of the living actor to awaken us and make us sensitive and responsive, the dramatist may strive to reach beyond outward truth to that inner truth which presents itself to us in deliberate and natural arrangements of life.

It is no easy thing to tell what is meant by the word Form when we take it past the idea of the design of things in a literal sense, and apply it to significance in the design of life. But it is easy to say that Form has nothing whatever to do with representation or illusion. As Clive Bell points out in his book Art, in which he makes a brilliant plea for what he calls “significant form” as the test of visual art, the fact that a thing is representative, does not at all suggest either the presence or the absence of Form. It does not preclude its having Form just as it does not in the least assure it. The theater will always have the physical body of the actor, and to that extent it will always be representational. But that is certainly all it need have of illusion. What the actor says and the atmosphere in which he appears may be absolutely non-representational. Even his physical body, as he uses it, may take on qualities outside and beyond illusion.

It remains the dramatist’s special business to master the extremely difficult task of fighting through to Form while retaining the realistic technique, or else—which seems far better—frankly to desert Realism, representation, illusion, and write directly in significant terms, no matter how unplausible they may be. After all, common sense sees that it is better to concentrate all of an artist’s technical energies on the major thing he wishes to accomplish. Bell says of the men and women of the future: “When they think of the early twentieth-century painters they will think only of the artists who tried to create Form—the artisans who tried to create illusions will be forgotten.” It is equally true that the artist who tries to create illusion is more than likely to forget to create Form.

Now creating Form does not mean hiding the actuality of the actor under strange robes. There seems to be a curious notion abroad that the alternative to Realism is Romance. It is true that in trying to escape out of Realism a number of playwrights have avoided reality and wandered into the never-never-land of Thalanna and Kongros. It is also true that modern sciences, history, archeology, and psychology, have made the past new and real and alive again, and that certain playwrights have seen in the rejuvenated ages a chance to escape the realistic and to attain more permanent values. But it is not true that the present offers smaller opportunities. Expressionist playwrights have already shown this conclusively enough; witness Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape.

Theatrical history has never been as popular with theatrical reformers as it should be. It shows not only that the realistic technique is a matter of the last half century, and that the greatest periods of the theater’s history were non-realistic. But it shows also that even when Realism was an impossible idea, and when expressive, significant Form was the only thing at which the playwright aimed, the theater and its audiences usually lived frankly and healthfully in the present.

Greek tragedy, to be sure, was not a thing of the present—except in the reality of its religious emotion. Its heroes came out of the past. They did not talk or act like the Athenians that watched them. They even dressed according to a set convention of their own. In every way the Greek tragic theater embraced Form, directly and naturally. It was in the temperament of the Greeks. Their sculpture was realistic to a degree never before reached and not surpassed in physical truth to-day; yet from these statues we gain a sense of Form far more significant than the sense of life which they give us. Representation was not an end to the Greek artist. The dramatist of Athens felt no desire to “humanize” his heroes or to make them like the people about him in any particular. The drama was religious in origin and had not yet grown temporal. So long as the Greek mind had its fondness for Form, there could be no demand for the smallest actuality.

But man’s natural fondness for “humanness” and “recognition” found plenty of opportunity for expression after the passing of the great Greeks. And it was satisfied in almost every case without breaking in too sharply on the heart of the drama, expression of Form. The medieval religious drama was both religious and temporal. The saints were very much of the times in clothes and in habits. The Bible characters lived the lives and wore the garments and exercised the minds of people of the Middle Ages. Shakespeare dipped back into history and into romance, too, but his Italian nobles dressed like Londoners, his Roman “mechanicals” were British workmen, and his Athenian yokels came out of the English countryside. Molière “modernized” the Roman rascal Phormio into the Neapolitan rascal Scapin, and the ordinary Parisian gentleman served him for Alceste. Phèdre and Iphigénie were not so very Greek. In England tragedians played Shakespeare in the costumes of their own day down through Garrick, Siddons, and Kemble. And do you imagine that all this had the slightest effect on the plays, any bearing on their expression of the inner Form rather than the outward shape of life? In spite of the flesh-and-blood actor, clothed in the costumes of the time, the playwright was saved from mere representation, from all this peep-hole business of Realism. Doubtless he was saved because the temper of his time was not corrupted and twisted and tortured by the unholy union of science and capitalism. But it is rather interesting to remember that the actors appeared in theaters so utterly unreal, so essentially theatrical, that nobody could imagine for a moment that he was standing with his eye glued to a chink in the fourth wall.

The theaters of the past united the temporal and the eternal, the passing moment and the permanent Form partly in innocence, and partly from a natural ability to understand things better in their own terms. We, too, can grasp more of the Form of life if we see it derived from the life we know. But this does not mean that the Elizabethans had the slightest interest in the thing that has absorbed our stage—plausibility, representation, resemblance. To-day we are beginning again to desire reality of soul instead of mere reality of body. We want to know about our own time and our own people, but we don’t give a hang to learn how imperfectly, how haltingly, a modern, realistic Hamlet would express his thoughts on suicide.

It is easy enough to see how much Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy would have lost if he had written like a Galsworthy. Poetry of word is not the only thing that would have gone by the board. Poetry of idea would have disappeared, too. More than that, the ability of a character to express himself would have been hideously confined within the formula of plausibility. Perhaps so great an artist could have written his tragedy without permitting a single person to speak an inner thought that time and circumstance could not bring out, but I am a little inclined to doubt it. And I am very much inclined to assert that the vitality and the effectiveness of such a work of unnatural and straining effort would have been nothing beside the vitality and effectiveness of the Hamlet we know.

For twenty years the European stage has struggled over the problem of plausibility and resemblance in setting. The thing called the new movement in the theater has spent half the time devising mechanisms and technique for achieving genuine representation instead of the bastard thing that tried to make a dining room out of badly painted and flimsy canvas. And it has spent about half the time trying to get rid of this machinery and this technique in order to escape the Realism which demanded such things. In Stockholm you see the touring company of the Moscow Art Theater playing realistic plays in just the sort of ugly, cheap, old setting that Craig, Reinhardt and Belasco equally set their faces against. In Dresden you see Shaw’s Pygmalion played at the State Schauspielhaus in settings as solid and illusive as stone and wood. In Paris you see the Russian Georges Pitoëff giving Andreyeff’s He Who Gets Slapped in black curtains with four ribbons looped up to indicate the form of a circus tent, and Tchehoff’s The Seagull in settings which go back to the old flapping canvas flats again, admitting that the theater is a place of pretense, and which then attempt—not very successfully—to give these flats, in color and outline, the Form of the play.

Still further along the way from Realism to an expressionist stage, you find Copeau’s naked stage in Paris that unites frankly with the auditorium, and changes very little from The S. S. Tenacity to Les Frères Karamazov. Finally in Vienna, you find, in the Redoutensaal made from the ballroom of Maria Theresa’s palace, a theater without proscenium, machinery or scenery, a theater where the actor is frankly the actor. Here you have the culminating expression of the growing sense in Europe that, because the stage is so close to life in the presence of the living actor, it need not and it must not attempt to create the illusion of reality. Through such a conception the theater is freed once more to seek the Form of life.