Continental stagecraft

To-day we are thinking more and more of the future of the theater, the future of the play and the playwright, the future of production, of direction and the actor.

If we are to think of the future to any effect, we must think of the past as well as the present. The path of to-morrow strikes off from the maze of to-day. To guess at its direction with much chance of success, we must look now and then at the map of the settled roads of yesterday.

If we want to estimate the chances of the non-realistic play to advance beyond its expressionist beginnings in Germany, we must try to understand the present state of the art of theatrical production, and the past of play and players, the theater and its stagecraft. A share of the future—a very large share, I believe—may lie with America; but the past is Continental. And a surprising amount of the past is German.

The past of the play shows one interesting peculiarity. The great plays of the romantic movement were developed where there were great theaters, in France and in Germany. Quite otherwise with Realism. Its greatest works—the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg—were created in small countries almost outside the consciousness of the nineteenth century theater. This was natural enough. Realistic plays were, in the last analysis, lonely literary rationalizations. They were not theatrical. They did not spring out of the theater. Instead they altered the theater to suit their needs. The theater that they altered most was the German theater, and there the dramas of the Scandinavians found their best audience.

But the German theater, being a healthy theater, could not stop at the point where it became an almost perfect mechanism for presenting these plays. Its directors and its artists went on experimenting. They had old plays to mount, also, plays out of the romantic and classic periods. They put their brains and their machines at work upon these pieces, as well as upon the realistic, and soon they had developed methods of production for non-realistic plays quite as admirable for the purpose as any of their tricks for lifting the fourth wall before our very eyes. The German theatrical organization became more and more restive under the realistic plays and the old “classics.” It was preparing for something new. The Zeitgeist was working. Soon it began to work upon the playwrights. There came abortive beginnings in the expressionist plays I have written about in the last chapter. And the German theater went on—and goes on—experimenting.

Let us look at this theater a little more closely. For it is the Continental theater to-day as it was yesterday; France has only Copeau, England experiments in little theaters as America experimented ten years ago. And where the Continental theater is, there we are very likely indeed to find the Continental play of the future. The expressionist drama, like every school of drama except the realistic, is a product of the theater in form and vitality, quite as much as it is a product of society in its mind and materials.

The story of the artistic development of the German theater past the realistic stage is familiar enough. It began in 1905, it was fairly complete by 1914. It was founded upon Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia, and it is symbolized in the name of Max Reinhardt. It made Realism still for Ibsen and Strindberg; but it plowed past the Realism of Otto Brahm—which is the Realism of Belasco—and it achieved a pregnant actuality so direct and simple that it soon gave birth to a new imagination.

The new methods of production are fairly easy to grasp. They rest on a few general principles. The pretenses of the theater had to be successful pretenses. To begin with, certain tricks of the old theater were forsworn, tricks in the main that failed to succeed. Such an obvious pretense as painted perspective had to go. Footlights had to be curbed; for the illumination must be both more natural and more beautiful. But, beyond these negative things, the directors sought to achieve positive effects for which they had to call into the theater artists of first-rate ability. The business of these artists, whether working on a realistic play or an imaginative one, was to evoke the atmosphere of the piece in setting and in lights. They fell back on three general principles to aid their sense of line and color in visually dramatizing the action. In the first place they simplified the stage picture. They subordinated or eliminated detail. They put as little as possible on the stage that might distract the spectator from the meaning of the general design (which was the meaning of the play), or from the actions and speeches of the characters. Then, by an adroit use of simple materials and forms, they enriched the setting—along the lines of the play—through suggestion. One detail suggested the nature of the whole. The base of a huge column made the audience visualize for itself the size of the building. Half an arch springing off into darkness created the impression of a great vaulted structure. Finally came a synthesis of all the available and appropriate forces of the theater, and of all the qualities of the play; this implying for the director the establishment of a certain apt rhythm in the performance.

This pictorial reform, backed by such direction and acting as the German theater alone was able to supply, and utilizing all manner of mechanical devices for scene-shifting and lighting, has stood to us for some ten years as the so-called new movement in the theater. It has been familiar through the names of Craig and Appia as pioneer theorists, of Reinhardt, and of artists like Ernst Stern and Alfred Roller; through an occasional production from abroad, like Reinhardt’s Sumurûn; and, at last, through the exceptional work of our own artists in America and the men—from Arthur Hopkins to directors of little theaters—who have given them their opportunities or amplified their conceptions.

Fringing the outside of all this in the past have been bastard minglings of old technique and new spirit, such as Bakst and the Ballets Russes displayed, and the beginnings of theory and experiment leading towards a new—or a very old—sort of theater, a theater cut off from the whole peep-hole convention of the proscenium and the fourth wall.

The strength of this movement in Germany lay partly in a very few talented directors like Reinhardt and artists like Stern, but very greatly in the vigorous and healthy organization of the German theater. Because of the division of Germany in small kingdoms and duchies, there had always been many centers of artistic life, each about a court in the capital. In a score of cities, enriched by industrial development, there were theaters endowed by the state or the city, and directed towards the highest artistic accomplishment. In the larger cities privately owned theaters followed the lead of the public institutions. The strength of these houses lay in their endowment, their ideals, and their system of organization. This was the repertory system. Here, as nowhere in England or America and only here or there in France, were theaters directed by a single mind, employing a permanent company of players, maintaining a repertory of plays, old and new, given in recurring succession night after night, theaters retaining therefore a permanent audience, dependable both in pocketbook and in taste. Supplementing these theaters were organizations of playgoers among the middle and lower classes, such as the Freie Volksbühne in Berlin, which widened the audience of subscribers to good work in the theater. Between endowment and the security of a permanent audience, it was possible for these German theaters to give uncommonly fine performances at uncommonly low prices.

Along with the development of new methods in production went a good deal of activity in theater building. In practice, as well as in theory, Max Littmann and Oskar Kaufmann, following Schinkel and Semper, who had worked with Goethe and Wagner, did much to improve the auditoriums of German theaters. The result is not so marked as in the case of the scenic artists. Most of the theaters are old indeed and awkwardly shaped, and too many of the new ones continue the tradition of a parquet surrounded and surmounted by three or four shallow, horseshoe-shaped balconies. These balconies are not so good to see or hear from as our own. A realization of the awkwardness of these shelves or Rangen, as they are termed in German, produced an opposition, headed by Littmann, that called for their elimination and for the substitution of an amphitheater type of house with no balconies and with a steeper floor to allow of better sight-lines. The fight of Ring vs. Rang has resulted in several auditoriums designed by Littmann, the Prinzregenten Theater and the Künstler, for example, in Munich, the slant of whose floors is far too sharp; from the upper rows, the players are seen as in some far-off pit. The slant is greater than necessary, and absolutely straight; the practice of the American architect, H. C. Ingalls, of grading the floor in a gradually increasing curve, produces a far better effect. A compromise between Rang and Ring might be found in a development of the American house with only one balcony; a more steeply slanting floor than we ordinarily have would thus bring two amphitheaters or Rings into a single auditorium. Germany possesses, however, some admirable playhouses in the Kammerspielhaus formerly directed by Reinhardt in Berlin, in the Volksbühne designed by Oskar Kaufmann, and in many features of the Künstler Theater. The seating arrangements have formed one of the best features of the German houses. The chairs are almost always too thinly padded; but the elimination of aisles more than compensates. The whole audience is united in a single responsive body. And because each row is a little wider than ours and the side walls of the auditoriums are liberally supplied with doors, the audience empties out more quickly than ours and in an orderly manner that puts American fire-regulations to shame. I have seen the three thousand spectators of the Volksbühne walk out in a single minute. It takes from three to four for a small theater in New York, seating only six hundred, to clear itself.

A factor that has done a great deal for the progress of the German theater and the reputation of the new stagecraft, is the liberal attitude of the German periodicals and publishing houses towards new things in the theater. Editors and writers have been so eager to present to the public every smallest reform in setting or theater that the world has gained rather an optimistic view of the extent of production progress in Germany. Just as it is a fact that only in a few theaters will you find model auditoriums in Central Europe, in a similar way you discover that the outstanding work of design before the war was done by two men, Stern and Roller, and that the other men whose names decorate the records of the new stagecraft were each responsible for only a few productions.

One thing further you may learn about the past of the German movement, even in an investigation so late as the summer of 1922. And that is that the color in a great majority of the stage settings has been very far from good. The German has an ear, a very marvelous ear; only the Russian can approach him in music, and it is not a near approach. But his eye is bad. Germany has produced no first-rate artists except Dürer, Schongauer and perhaps Cranach, and Dürer and Schongauer are celebrated as etchers rather than as painters. That should have been caution enough for those of us who had to study the German stage at the distance of the half-tone. The fact of the matter is that the German is a splendid theorist, a man of large conceptions, and that therefore in the theater he has been able to design settings of simple and excellent proportions, which create a good effect in black-and-white. It is his sense of color that is at fault. Stern, with the mixture of the Oriental in his blood which did so much for Bakst, and some of the artists from Vienna and the South brought something to the stage besides dramatic imagination and sense of proportion. The test of color downs the rest.

When we think of the future of the German theater we must naturally think of the present also, and it is a black present. Germany has been shattered spiritually as well as economically. It has fallen from dreams of world-dominion to bankruptcy and enslavement. The effect of this upon the mind of the citizen who has come through four years of danger and privation, is staggering. One incident of the fall, which you learn upon visiting Germany, is sharply significant. Until the soldiers from the broken German armies began to stream back into the Rhine provinces in November, 1918, the men and women behind the front believed that their forces were victorious. It is possible for the theater to go on physically under almost any conditions of privation; but you must reckon spiritually with an extraordinary state of the public mind when you prophesy the future of the German theater. Two things, perhaps, make optimism possible. One: Germany and the German people have gone through terrible things before; there was the Thirty Years War. Two: Germany still has the wonderfully trained audience of pre-war days; it was a broad democratic audience, and no shift in economic circumstances can destroy so large a part of the cultured playgoers as war-poverty has done in England, in France, and even to some extent in America.

War—backed by the movies—has done its worst in the Berlin theater. Here we find another example of the exchange of ideals and personalities which has often been noted between victor and vanquished. Just as America has been Prussianized in its attitude towards the foreigner and the liberal or radical minority, Berlin has adopted many of the most evil features of the American theatrical system. Within three years of the close of hostilities Berlin was being rapidly Broadway-ized. Repertory was practically dead at all but three or four theaters. Facing economic difficulties and the competition of the movies for the services of the actors, Berlin found it was a large enough city to support long runs for exceptionally great or exceptionally mediocre plays. Even the three theaters that Reinhardt formerly directed broke from repertory, and where they had once shown ten or a dozen productions in two weeks, they showed only three or (counting Sunday matinees of some old favorites) four. Outside Berlin, repertory continues in the State and City theaters and even in private ventures; but many artistic playhouses are badly crippled by the economic troubles of the nation, and some are forced to close down.

There are certain good signs. The theaters were full in 1922. In fifty or sixty visits to the theater it was only at musical comedies that I saw more than one row of vacant seats; in all but half a dozen cases every seat was sold and occupied. The prices were not high. In Frankfort, an average city of the larger size, the highest prices ranged from sixty marks (at that time twenty cents) to one hundred and twenty marks, depending on the expensiveness or the popularity of the production; while the lowest prices for seats were twenty marks to seventy marks, with standing room at six marks.

At such prices even full houses do not make budgets easy to balance. The theater of post-war Germany must be economical in its expenditures. That is not, however, such an artistic hardship as much of the talk of elaborate machinery and handsome productions in pre-war days might suggest. Rigorous physical simplicity and a reliance on the genius of design instead of elaboration of mechanics are the vital needs in stage setting to-day. Germany has done fine things in the simplifying of production, and it has done them in spite of the temptations of bulging pocketbooks. What it may be forced to do now through poverty is a matter for real hope.

The danger—for there is a danger—is that smaller minds may find an excuse for a mean sort of simplicity, a bareness and barrenness of spirit. There has always been a tendency among the modern directors and designers to economize spiritually as well as economically. The results have been seen in some of our dry, meager “little theater” productions, full of bare formalism—a sort of “simplism” that has no place in any art, let alone in the live, varied, rich, and vigorous theater. Occasionally a German artist of real talent falls into this thin manner; Ludwig Sievert has mounted Towards Damascus at the Frankfort Schauspielhaus upon a scheme which is physically interesting, but he has given his settings a mean, arid, spiritually poverty-stricken appearance which is never beautiful, and does not express in the least the intense quality of Strindberg’s play.

The movies break up ensemble in Germany, and bear down on repertory. They offer salaries that the actor, impoverished quite as much as the worker, cannot resist. Moreover they demand from him the daylight hours which must be given to rehearsals of old and new pieces if repertory is to exist. The German actor cannot appear in a repertory theater in the evenings, as our actor can appear upon Broadway, and put in his days in front of the camera, as ours often does. But—and this is highly important—the German actor has been trained in a school of ideals and self-expression which makes him demand more than the movies can give him. He must have some sort of serious work in the theater, and he is finding it more and more in special summer engagements or Festspiele. Thus many of the greatest of the nation’s players are often assembled at salaries which, by comparison with their motion picture earnings, are hardly salaries at all.

There remains the spirit of the German people. The audiences are intact and intelligent, but what about their spirit? Can these people live down their sufferings or lift them up to something great outside themselves? The prospect is not so dark in the southern parts, in Bavaria, perhaps; it is certainly bright in Austria, where hunger and economic misery are the realest and where the divinity of the human spirit is asserted again and again in every happy gesture of this lovely people. In Berlin it is another matter. Spiritual dejection and gnawing misery are in the face of every one. They are to be seen on the stage, too. Berlin does not go to the theater to be taken out of itself; it seems to neglect the prime use of art. Berlin demands an echoing misery from its playhouses. It goes to see a blacker and more despicable Richard III than Shakespeare ever imagined. It suffers the torments of disillusioned revolution in Masse-Mensch at the working people’s theater. It throngs the glowering caverns of the Grosses Schauspielhaus. And everywhere the stage is hung in black curtains. “Warum immer die schwarzen Vorhänge?” we ask again and again. Perhaps they are only an accident of the attempt to get a background of emptiness; but they become a yawning gulf of spiritual blackness. The only colors to break the pall are the red of blood, and the blue that strikes across the black a symbol of a sinister cruelty.

Of course, black curtains are no Teuton monopoly. When the Russian Pitoëff uses them in Paris, when we see them on Broadway and in our “little theaters,” we do not look for the words “Made in Germany” on the selvage. But in Germany they seem numerous and more significant. If the curtains were sometimes dappled with gray or if they were opalescent with hidden lights, they might be significant of nothing more than the Germans’ immensely active experiments with a formal stage. Perhaps bunte Vorhänge are coming. Perhaps it is always a little dark before dawn.