Continental stagecraft

There are many things upon the German stage besides black dawn. The twilight of the machines, for instance, and all the past of the new stagecraft lagging superfluous.

Even the past of the old stagecraft. In the same theater in Frankfort where one of the three significant pairs of German directors and artists labors, I have seen Peer Gynt given as incompetently as any patron of an American small-town stock company could demand. The settings were hideous; the same badly painted backdrop served for two or three scenes in different localities; the revolving stage rumbled noisily and did nothing to shorten intermissions. While the orchestra played Grieg’s introductory music in the wings and the stage was dark, waiting actors, who imagined that thereby ears as well as eyes were dimmed, restlessly shifted from one foot to another in squeaky shoes. At the beginning of each scene the lights came up like thunder. Through as many scenes as could be endured, the same players who gave a sharp, almost electric performance of Maria Stuart the next night, acted Peer Gynt dully and sloppily to a running fire of assistance from the prompter’s box. It is worth remarking, incidentally, that the souffleur, as he is euphemistically called, is no necessity in the repertory theater. He may give a complete and studied reading of the text one lap ahead of the actors in the Grosses Schauspielhaus, the Frankfort Schauspielhaus, the Burgtheater in Vienna, the Lessing Theater in Berlin, and a dozen other first-class theaters; but you don’t hear his voice in the State Schauspielhaus of Berlin under Jessner, in Copeau’s Vieux-Colombier in Paris, or during a performance of Masse-Mensch at the Volksbühne.

The past of the German stage is seldom slovenly, but it is often disturbing. To see in 1922 a setting by Roller for Die Meistersinger is like encountering at a fashionable New York thé dansant the girl you used to take to high school dances in St. Louis in 1907. The German stage is full of such disquieting reminders of juvenile infatuations; Sweden is not exempt. The work of the pioneers and imitations of the work of the pioneers are still to be seen. Verdi’s Macbeth à la Craig at the Stockholm Opera; The Sunken Bell at the Grosses Schauspielhaus with Stern’s hill from Penthesilea; Reinhardt effects in Maria Stuart in Frankfort; good old Russian painting in faked perspective in Florian Geyer in Munich; a wedding of Heinrich Leffler and Maxfield Parrish at Dresden in the Verdi opera which the Germans so cheerfully translate as Der Troubadour; the style, if you can call it that, of the Washington Square Players in Towards Damascus in Frankfort. Everywhere traces of Reinhardt and Craig and Roller.

Roller, alone of the artists who were new fifteen years ago, is still busy in the theater. The mood he arouses is mixed. It is thoroughly annoying to find him so unable to grasp the problem of setting in the remarkable new theater in the Redoutensaal in Vienna, unable to see that the Gobelins and the crystal, the golden moldings and the rich baroque ornament of that marvelous room which is both stage and auditorium, must set the style and color of the screens and formal set pieces of the stage. It is a little sad to see Roller trying in Kain at the Burgtheater to adopt the steps and black curtains and the one or two plastics of the newer and younger men. When he is decking out some war-horse like Die Meistersinger in the good old style of the revolutionists of 1910, you have to forgive him much, even while you wonder at the limitations of so many of the stage designers outside Russia. Take the first scene, for example. Dramatically the thing is right in proportion and arrangement. It is an interesting composition of wall spaces and doors, which becomes all the more interesting when the director has arranged the many costumed characters in waves that ripple along the shore of the picture and roll up here and there about some promontory of the design. But when you look away from composition to color, you see a lack. It is not the difficulty of bad color, which besets most of the Germans; Roller and Stern generally escape that. The fact of the matter is that there simply isn’t any color—in spite of a furnace of dulled orange smoldering on the walls, and some gray-greens damping it down for contrast. This is not color in the sense that the Russians know it. Roller does not think in color as does Nicolas Roerich. What Westerner does—or ever has? Roller thinks in line and mass and proportion. Then he goes to his paint-box, and selects two nicely contrasting tones, more or less appropriate to a large medieval building. He never bothers his head over the dramatic problem of whether they mean anything in relation to the action, or the artistic problem of whether he has made one of those subtle arrangements of many curiously harmonizing colors, which, in the alchemy of the eye, take on a psychic significance.

Such laggard things—the relics of Craig-ideas and the work of various of the elder directors and artists—play a more or less normal part in the life of the German stage. They would find a parallel in any age. They know their place and keep to it. Something that is only just beginning to learn its proper and subordinate part in the advance of the theater is the far-famed stage machinery of Germany.

It was the most natural thing in the world that the Germans should turn their stage into a machine shop. When they build one of their great five-story office buildings they begin by laying a railroad along two sides on the street level and another up in the air above it, and putting in a traveling elevator, dump-cart, and crane that runs along on the tracks; after they have this gigantic apparatus in order, building the building is mere child’s play. Der verrückte Krieg was all that prevented the development of a most ingenious mechanism for erecting the erector that builds the building.

The German stage machine is a Frankenstein stage-hand. It is intended to do the work of scene shifting at great economy of effort and time. Actually the German theaters seem to employ more stage hands than the American theaters, and the waits are no shorter on the whole than those we are able to manage if we want to.

There are two main divisions to the species. Lewis Carroll, listing the different varieties of Snarks, supplied a formula. There are those, it is said, that are round and revolve, and those that have rollers and slide. The revolving stage—made famous by the cohorts of Reinhardt—and the sliding stage—which includes a sinking variety.

The revolving stage has its furious adherents. They include Reinhardt, Stern, who utilized its shortcomings quite as marvelously as its good points in his productions for Reinhardt, and the host of Reinhardt disciples. It came from Japan in 1896 through Lautenschläger of Munich. It is a great circle cut out of the stage floor and mounted on wheels so that it may be freely turned by hand or power. The circle is from forty to sixty feet across, and usually occupies the greater part of the stage space. On it the different settings are placed back to back, anywhere from two to ten fitting snugly together. One after another of these settings is presented in the opening of the proscenium as the stage revolves. It retains its reputation because it is the simplest and handiest scene-shifting machine to use with the great solid plaster dome which Reinhardt and so many other directors found essential as a substitute for the flapping and wrinkling canvas sky.

The sliding stage pure and simple is just a couple of low platforms the size of that part of the stage usually acted on. These carry the settings and slide out sideways into the wings. While one platform is in front of the proscenium with the actors giving the play in its setting, the other is being reset at the right or the left. It is easy to see that these platforms cannot slide past either end of the plaster dome if it is far enough down front to be of any use. The Deutsches Opernhaus in Charlottenburg, Berlin, gets around this by having the whole gigantic dome slide, too; hung from tracks and carrying its lights with it, the dome is pushed back into the depths of the stage when the platforms at the front have to slide. The amusing feature is that the present director of the theater has so little notion of what it is all for that in Don Giovanni he makes a number of changes by rigging his flats and drops on lines, as we might do, and hoisting them into the flies in full view of the audience on what is by a polite fiction called a dark stage.

All this whirling of palaces and scuttling of skies is child’s play beside the sinking stage. As developed by Adolf Linnebach, technical director of the State Schauspielhaus in Dresden, it almost defies understanding or description. The simplest variety is to be found across the National Gallery and the Theaterplatz under the guiding and inventive hand of Max Hasait of the State Opera House, Linnebach’s great mechanical rival. The stage of the Opera is divided into seven sections from the proscenium opening to the spot a hundred feet back where the Hinterbühne or auxiliary rear-stage begins. These seven sections can rise some feet above the stage level or sink into the basement. While the front sections are in the basement, carrying a setting that has already been used, the rear sections, with another setting on them, can, by a complicated arrangement, be rolled down on tracks to take the place of the front sections in the proscenium opening. While the front sections are in the basement the setting upon them is changed; the same thing happens to the rear sections when they are rolled back again. The stage of the Schauspielhaus is far more complicated. It is divided in only three sections, but when the two forward sections are in the basement, sliding stages of the ordinary sort, which rest upon them, can be slid out to the sides for changes of scene. On these sliding stages small “wagon stages” or mechanical stage hands operate, carrying large pieces such as stairs and mantels into place. Under the orchestra pit at the front is another contrivance, like a small stage on stilts, which can be trundled onto the first sinking stage straddling the setting. Thus two stages are super-imposed, and a sort of elevator stage produced, such as Steele MacKaye once invented. Hasait is nursing a scheme for rearranging his sinking and sliding stages so that the seven stages may run forward, sink to the basement, slide back, rise, and run forward again in rapid succession like an endless chain. The prospect is distinctly startling. Opponents of the new stagecraft have often claimed that the scenery ignores the actor. With the sliding and sinking stage a little further advanced, you can imagine the scenery taking a really furious interest in the actor, pursuing him from floor to basement and back again. You can imagine some new director working out a drama in which a cathedral chases an apostate priest about the stage, or a phallic column pursues the heroine into the darkness of the cellar only to lose her as she rises triumphantly on the last of the seven mystic stages guided and blessed by that unique functionary of the German theater, the Obermaschineninspektor.

There are peculiar disadvantages to these expensive mechanisms. The revolving stage simply can’t handle certain scenes without ceasing to be a revolving stage. It is impossible to use the entire width or depth of the stage for an exterior without shoving all the other scenes off the “revolver,” and giving up its use. All exterior scenes on the revolving stage have to go up over the rooms set at the back. The western prairies and the North German sea coast are equally unpopular with the friends of the revolving stage. The exceptionally fine production of Masse-Mensch—with its various great steps the whole width and half the height of the stage, alternating with flat open scenes—received almost no assistance from the “revolver” at the Volksbühne in Berlin. The technical director, putting this stage through its paces and exhibiting such amusing tricks as its ability to rise or sink some six feet at either end, thus producing a slanting floor, confessed that he much preferred some other type of stage.

The sliding and sinking stage has fewer disadvantages; but it is an elaborate, expensive, and cumbersome machine to do the work that designers and stage hands might quite as well accomplish. On the matter of expense, it is disquieting to hear at a scene-rehearsal of Das Rheingold that one hundred and fifty men, including electricians, are busy with this labor-saving device. It is still more disturbing to the machine-worshiper to time the intermissions in German theaters, and to find that waits of from two to five minutes are quite as frequent as in America. The explanation, of course, is the costumes. “The stage was all set in half a minute, but we had to wait for the tenor to get into his blue tights.” It looks very much as if the Maschineninspektoren should have introduced sliding wardrobes or adapted the harnessing devices of fire-houses before they put thousands of dollars into sliding stages.

The German technical men are beginning to chafe at the limitations of the machines, to be content to push them into second place. If you talk to Linnebach, at Dresden, once high priest of the sliding stage, you will note with some surprise that the word einfach has a Carolinian way of getting into the conversation. Things must be simpler. No big solid sets; instead, some curtains and lights and a dome on which to project painted designs. The word Podium also crops out. Like almost all forward-looking artists and directors in Germany, Linnebach wants to put the actor on a sort of tribune thrust out into the audience. He wants to give him back the vital heritage of the Greek and the medieval stages. Linnebach is content mechanically with the devices of the electrician; when he mounted Hasenclever’s expressionist drama, Jenseits, he made the setting out of light and shadow, a few chairs and tables, only one or two set pieces, and some projected backgrounds.

Machinery like the sinking stage has advantages apart from its ability to change heavy realistic sets. It is difficult to see how the opening scene of Shaw’s Pygmalion, looking out to the street from under the portico of Covent Garden, could be better created or more quickly shifted than in Linnebach’s production. Certainly without the ability to sink with ease the rear part of the stage three or four feet, he could not have given us the natural effect of the street level below the eyes of the audience and the actors. The great virtue of a mechanical stage of this kind is not to shift scenery, so much as to supply economically and quickly different levels for the actors to play upon. The use of levels is one of the important advances of the Continental theater since the war, and the sinking stage helps greatly with this. With a few inner prosceniums and simple backgrounds, it can supply, as it were, an infinite variety of formal stages such as the Continental theater seems slowly to be tending toward.

Barring the realistic and the formal, there is a middle ground in which the machine is of little value compared with the designer. In Linnebach’s theater—though not from his designs—a Hindu romance, Vasantasena, was mounted frankly and freshly against flat settings in the style of Indian miniatures. This was accomplished, without the aid of stage machinery, by the use of a permanent setting or portal of Indian design, with steps and a platform, on which, framed within an inner proscenium, drops and profiles were changed much as we would change them. The artist, Otto Hettner, supplied a style, as well as a formal stage, which made the machine taboo. Working with Pasetti at the National Theater in Munich, Linnebach accomplished the changes of Das Rheingold quite as easily. In an older production at Dresden, under Hasait, the fields of the gods opposite Valhalla were made of bulky platforms and plastic rocks, which went rolling back behind the cyclorama while up from the basement came in one piece the cave of the Nibelungen with its nooks and corners, its overhanging ceiling, and its whole equipment of plastic canvas rocks, which might have come out of some cavern on a scenic railway. In Munich the simpler levels of the fields in the second scene served in the cave scene also. They were lost in the shadows, along with the side walls, which were hardly more than masking curtains. The rocky cave was suggested wholly by the backdrop. This was painted in broken, converging lines of rock formations. Because of the magic of light, it did not seem like some conventional old backdrop.

The spirit of the theater as it has developed since the war seems to call upon the designer and régisseur instead of the mechanician. When artists were building heavy and cumbersome settings, elaborate in physical proportions if not in design, sliding and revolving stages were unquestionably necessary, though we may well ask how much the presence of the mechanisms tempted the artists into such excess. To-day, however, the setting is being stylized, the stage itself made formal. Machinery becomes irrelevant. Copeau does not need it even for the realistic Les Frères Karamazov; the Redoutensaal is almost too innocent to suspect its existence. Régisseurs of the new sort want something more theatrical than a turntable that any round-house might boast.

The playwright works with the régisseur and the artist to this same end. While Dorothy Richardson, Waldo Frank, and James Joyce are busy taking the machinery out of the novel, the playwrights are making machinery unnecessary for drama. They drop “atmosphere,” and take up the soul. They seek the subjective instead of the physical. They want to thrill us with the mysteries and clarities of the unconscious, instead of cozening us with photographic detail or romantic color. For all this they need imagination in setting, not actuality. Form carries the spirit up and out. Indications speak to it louder than actualities. Design, which is of the spirit, drives out mechanism, which is of the brain.

The day of the machine is over in the theater, the day of its domination at any rate. For a time it looked as though the name of the old theater in the Tuileries would have to be painted over every stage door in Germany—La Salle des Machines. Now the stage machine is sinking into its proper place—the cellar. A new device is lording it in the theater, but it cannot be called a machine. The electric light is not a mechanical thing. It is miraculously animated by something very like the Life Force, and night by night its living rays are directed to new and unforeseen ends.