Continental stagecraft

The story of the attempt of the theater to escape from Realism is a curious story. As a deliberate effort of the playwrights to see life in the terms of Form instead of accidental actuality it goes back only half a dozen years through the dramas of the Germans who adopted the word Expressionism to describe their aim and technique. It has hung potential for ten or fifteen years in the work of the more advanced and philosophic designers and directors of the new stagecraft, a waiting stimulus to the playwrights. As an unconscious impulse to reach beyond the limits of Realism its beginnings are to be traced back twenty, thirty, almost forty years in the work of some of Europe’s ablest realists.

The two greatest figures in the modern theater—which is the realistic theater—give the same demonstration of the limitations of Realism, and turn in the same fashion away from actuality and towards an intense spiritual vitality. Both Ibsen and Strindberg come out of Romanticism into Realism, and pass on into a Symbolism that is far on the way towards Expressionism. In Ibsen the new tendency is clearly marked in The Wild Duck (1884) and develops gradually through The Master Builder (1892) to completion in When We Dead Awaken (1899). Strindberg’s Towards Damascus (1898) carries strong hints of the spiritual intensity which threatened the outer reality of so many of Strindberg’s earlier plays; and by 1902, in Swanwhite and The Dream Play, he is well embarked on a type of non-realistic drama which finds a bizarre culmination in The Spook Sonata in 1907.

Two other European playwrights of distinction—Tchehoff and Wedekind—show a similar dissatisfaction with pure Realism, though neither passes through the three stages of development to be traced in Ibsen and Strindberg. The work of Tchehoff and the work of Wedekind is all pretty much of a piece. It is never wholly realistic in the narrowest sense. Each has a peculiar quality and method throughout. Tchehoff, beginning in 1896 with The Seagull, keeps to a Realism of such intense spiritual truth that, in a performance of his The Cherry Orchard by the Moscow Art Theater such as I have described, its extraordinary virtues are the virtues of Expressionism. Wedekind’s first play, the thesis-drama The Awakening of Spring, written in 1891, is stamped with his curious and violent intensity, and his sense of the spiritual overtones of life. In 1895 and 1903 he produced in the two parts of Lulu—Erdgeist and Pandora’s Box—dramas horrifically actual in their pictures of sexual aberration and at the same time so intense psychologically and so sharply defined and apt in action that their Realism treads close on the boundaries which Expressionism has over-passed.

There is a curious distinction in end and means between such plays as these of Ibsen, Strindberg, Tchehoff, and Wedekind, and the newer expressionist dramas of Germany and America. The earlier plays indulge in symbolic, fantastic, deeply spiritual ideas, but their language is almost always highly realistic. They are still bound to the past of their authors and to the present of their theater. The newer expressionist dramas, on the other hand, are as free in speech as they are in idea. It is a freedom that often makes a harmonious wedding of end and means. Sometimes, as in plays of Der Sturm group, the language is so completely free from the bonds of actuality that it approaches the onomatopoetic verse of Mallarmé depending on sound for its sense. In Eugene O’Neill’s distinguished piece of Expressionism, The Hairy Ape, the playwright strikes a happy medium with speech which is realistic and characteristic in idiom but which is developed in idea, intensity and length of utterance clean past the possibilities of the people of the play. Occasionally you find a pseudo-expressionist piece like Vatermord, by Arnold Bronnen, whose action is naturalistic—grossly naturalistic—but whose language is often far from natural. This piece was first produced in Berlin in the summer of 1922 when the mind of the German capital could safely be described as neurotic. Its subject matter—the incest and patricide of the Œdipus complex, with a little adventitious homosexuality, all circling about a boy in his ’teens—produced a stormy session between adherents and opponents, a session finally ended by the Schutzpolizei with rifles and the command: “Sei ruhig, meine Herrschaften!” The run which followed at one of the theaters formerly directed by Max Reinhardt may be explained by the notorious subject matter, but there were critics to assert that Bronnen had a style of considerable power as well as novelty. The boy’s final speech, as he staggers onto the stage from an inner room, where he has killed his father, and rebuffs the passionate entreaties of his mother, is translated from the printed version, retaining the one form of punctuation used, the slanting dash to indicate the end of a line, though not necessarily of a sentence:

I’m through with you / I’m through with everything / Go bury
your husband you are old / I am young / I don’t know you /
I am free /

Nobody in front of me nobody next to me nobody over me father’s
dead / Heaven I spring up to you I fly / It pounds shakes groans
complains must rise swells wells up springs up flies must rise must
rise

I
I bloom

Before such an arrangement of words The Spook Sonata seems almost mid-Victorian. The Student speaks to the ghostly Milkmaid in the most matter of fact fashion. Even the old Mummy, the mad woman who always sits in a closet, talks like a most realistic parrot when she is not talking like a most realistic woman. Here it is the ideas that stagger and affright you, the molding minds, the walking Dead, the cook who draws all the nourishment out of the food before she serves it, the terrible relations of young and old; all of them are things having faint patterns in actuality and raised by Strindberg to a horrible clarity.

To follow the banner of Expressionism in playwriting—I say nothing of stage setting, for that is, happily, another matter—requires all three Graces and a strong stomach. The bizarre morbidity, the nauseating sexuality, the lack of any trace of joy or beauty, which characterize the work of most of those who labeled themselves expressionists in Germany during the past few years, match Strindberg at his unhappiest, while the vigor with which they drive their ideas forth in speech far outdoes him. Expressionism, in the narrow sense in which such plays define it, is a violent storm of emotion beating up from the unconscious mind. It is no more than the waves which shatter themselves on the shore of our conscious existence, only a distorted hint of the deep and mysterious sea of the unconscious. Expressionism, as we have so far known it, is a meeting of the fringes of the conscious and the unconscious, and the meeting is startling indeed.

Germany’s reception of the expressionist plays was open-minded, as is Germany’s reception of almost all new effort. The dramas of the best of the expressionists—Georg Kaiser and Walter Hasenclever—were produced in leading theaters, on the official stages of Dresden and of Frankfort, and in Reinhardt’s playhouses, for example. But by the summer of 1922 they had disappeared from the very catholic and long-suffering repertories of these houses, and while Wedekind and Strindberg were produced from Stockholm to Vienna, the simon-pure expressionists, the playwrights of what I think it is fair to call the lesser Expressionism, were hardly to be seen. Only the one-act opera, Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen, a composition by Paul Hindemith on a playlet by the artist-author, Oskar Kokoschka, was being played.

This piece, produced at the City Opera House in Frankfort, points an interesting union and parallel between at least one sort of Expressionism and music. The action, passing in some indefinite olden time, is symbolically very difficult—quite as difficult as its title, Murderer, Hope of Women. The emotion of the scenes, on the other hand, is clear enough, and it receives from the music a background of color, a tonal reinforcement, that is most welcome; at the same time the composer finds in the vigorous and intense, if somewhat arbitrary, feeling of the playwright a provocative challenge.

Kokoschka himself designed a setting for Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen when it was first produced at the Albert Theater in Dresden as a play. A photograph of the production betrays an uneasy setting, hardly stage-worthy in arrangement and composition, and rather badly executed. The pages of Die Neue Schaubühne have shown several other expressionist stage designs as unsatisfactory, but in the more widely known productions these pieces have been lucky enough to fall into the hands of first-rate men like Adolf Linnebach of Dresden and Ludwig Sievert of Frankfort. Sketches made from Linnebach’s production of Hasenclever’s Jenseits in Dresden show a simple and effective use of light and shadow and of little else, with certain necessary elements of design projected by a sort of magic-lantern technique upon the background of dome or curtain. In actual performance Sievert’s setting for the Kokoschka opera is strong and arresting with dark surfaces massed in triangles symbolic of the feminine element dominant in the piece, and with a successful, if not very subtle, use of red and red-orange on the pylon surfaces guarding the prison door. The direction of the singers and chorus, under the hand of Dr. Ernst Lert, is a thoroughly expressive part of music and setting.

Though the most celebrated plays of the expressionist pioneers have failed to make a place for themselves in the German repertory, they have had their effect. Playwrights who might have written in the conventional mode have been turned towards a freer technique, and they have succeeded in accomplishing interesting and promising things. The most notable of the plays thus produced, Masse-Mensch, deserves a chapter to itself. I shall write here of two lesser works by Karel Capek, one seen in the Czech National Theater, where it was first produced, the other read in a German translation.

In the first, The Insect Comedy, Karel Capek’s brother, a scenic artist, has a share as collaborator. It is a fantastic and picturesque piece of satire providing excellent opportunities for the newer methods in production. It is a comment on post-war conditions as symbolized in the life of butterflies, beetles, and ants. The prolog finds a young man wandering in the woods, and puts him comfortably to sleep on a grassy bank after a little talk with an absurdly pedantical entomologist. He sleeps through the three succeeding acts surrounded and occasionally disturbed by figures of insects grown life-size. The first act passes with the brilliant butterflies, who stand for the heedless, unproductive men and women of the social and pseudo-artistic worlds with time for only chatter and flirtation while disaster rumbles beneath them. In the production of this scene, the régisseur, K. H. Hilar, keeps the players moving ceaselessly, their hands and heads lightly undulating, with the restlessness of the antennæed world, while high around the back of the scene various of the brightly costumed insects constantly dance behind the translucent curtain of the woods.

In the second scene the humble grubs crawl in and out of their burrows on busy errands of accumulation. These are the assiduous profiteers and misers of war-time society. The act ends in a broad touch of comedy. A beetle has been murdering passing insects and dragging their bodies down below for his wife to hoard. There enters The Parasite, a tramp bug. He does not work. Why should he? He has only to wait for the busy capitalists of his world to fill their larders. Then, when the time comes, he will rise—or more accurately descend—and the wealth of the world will be his. He ducks into the beetle’s hole, and in a few moments he comes up, a swollen and jovial Communist, dancing in glee. The ever-present prompter’s box serves conveniently for one of the holes, and the background of green and black woods is projected instead of painted; otherwise there is little of interest in the staging of this scene.

The third act carries us to the ants. Here are the eternal laborers, tramping in an endless circle upon their work, under the eye of superiors very like officers and to a rhythm beaten out by a more privileged one of their own number. The Capeks costume the army of ants in khaki, puttees and all, and provide a desolate hill for a background. It might be blasted by either war or commerce. Into its surface descend shafts that might lead to either mines or dugouts. A glowering background of crazy chimneys and telegraph poles and smoke—all projected on the cyclorama—completes the picture. Presently there come shouting and a courier. More couriers. War threatens. The ants drop their burdens for rifles and continue their march. The officer-ants assume a higher station and even loftier phrases of command; from the back they philosophize and give orders in good old Kaiser-fashion. The act culminates with a conflict and the lordship of a new race of ants.

The epilog is divided between the appearance from her chrysalis of an ephemera of whom the sleeping man has been dimly and hopefully conscious in the last two scenes, her death after a dance with other short-lived mayflies, and the despairing end of the human visitor. This end is commented upon in a half satiric and half aspiring vein through the introduction of a group of wanderers who come upon the dead body, gaze at it in astonishment and sadness for a moment, and then pass on, singing, upon the ever-creative way of the peasant.

R. U. R., Karel Capek’s other play (in German, W. U. R.) is a tale of a Frankenstein such as H. G. Wells might have written in his earlier days. It seems both gruesomely effective and at times philosophic. The letters “R. U. R.” are an abbreviation of the name of a firm engaged in manufacturing “Roboters,” or workmen stamped out and given life by a machine. After a not very skilful exposition of the nature of this new device for lightening the world’s work, the play passes on to show the degenerating effect upon mankind of ceasing to labor. The “Roboters” are given pain in order to remind them not to be careless and break their legs and arms. Thereupon they acquire something not unlike a soul. Presently comes a consciousness of their station and their power. They rise and kill all mankind—except one man. Later they find to their dismay that the secret formula of the materials from which they were stamped out has been destroyed. They wear out in twenty years. And there will be an end. The last act shows their frantic appeal for a way to perpetuate themselves. The one man finds it at last when he recognizes love awakening in a male and a female “Roboter.” The process of mankind will begin once more. Rather the sort of end that Anatole France would have put to the story—Frankenstein turned man.

None of this, of course—either Kaiser or Capek—is Expressionism very far on its way. Some of it is trivial. Some is interesting enough. Much is decadent or uncertain. But it is not difficult to believe that there is something of the future in it. It is a sign. There is a starlike gleam in even the worst of the mire. Vitality, though often a morbid vitality, animates it. When we see Eugene O’Neill saying Nay to Realism in the same fashion, and turning out so strong and significant a play as The Hairy Ape—a play that grows greater in the perspective of Europe—it is not very difficult to hope and to look forward.

In the artists who give Expressionism a physical form and a pictorial atmosphere upon the stage we find still more of hope. They have gone more quickly and more securely towards their goal. They have had a disciplinary practice upon the plays of an earlier time, a time before Realism. They are freed from the moral problems of the writer; and where their work is distempered with the morbidity, the unhealthiness, of so much of our time, the result is less obvious in color or design than it would be if it took the form of words. And they have had behind them the history and the example of the movement in art which we once called Post-Impressionism, but which follows logically into Expressionism, the movement of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Duchamp.

The problem for the expressionist play is the problem of music. And yet not its problem; for music, being so markedly apart from actuality in its materials, has made few and not very successful attempts at the Realism which has swamped our stage. Music has been by very nature expressionistic. It has failed whenever, as program music, it approached the suggestion of the actual. For the rest, it has soared, soared easily, surely, towards direct expression of spiritual reality. Expressionism in the theater has to seek the way of music, the way towards beauty and ecstasy. The difficulty of the playwright is that he must always feel the pull of the actual life about him; he must make his drama out of human beings and not out of pure vision or pure emotional response. The world about him is corrupt and corrupting outwardly, as well as beautiful and wonderful within. He cannot, like the musician, leap away from its entanglements by putting his hands to an instrument of abstract art. But he can gain a certain release by forswearing as much as possible the reproduction of the actual.