Continental stagecraft

In the ’eighties and the ’nineties, when electricity came into the theater to take the place of gas, light was only illumination. By the first decade of the twentieth century it had become atmosphere. To-day it is taking the place of setting in many Continental theaters. To-morrow it may be part of drama itself.

In 1893 a Swiss doctor named Adolphe Appia published a little book in French on the production of Wagner’s music-dramas; six years later he elaborated his ideas in a volume published in a German translation as Die Musik und die Inscenierung, the first and perhaps the greatest book of theory on the new art of the theater. Among other things, he discussed lighting at great length. He made a very important observation. He noted that the lighting of the stage of his day was hardly more than mere illumination—something to make all objects equally bright and visible. It was quite as necessary, he believed, to make certain objects more visible than others, and to make them more living, more dramatic. At the time the lighting apparatus of the theater was crude, because the electric light was in its infancy. There were only small electric bulbs, arranged in rows for footlights below and borderlights overhead, to supply flat illumination, and arc lights, which were movable and could be made to “spot” out figures more brilliantly. Appia recognized in these last the means for making the figure of the actor brilliant and dynamic. With his eye on these spotlights he made an unheard-of demand. He asked for shadows. He said that light and shade gave three dimensions to the player and three dimensions to the setting (provided, as he suggested, the setting be made plastic instead of flat). By means of light he wanted to link the living actor and the dead setting. He went further than using shadows and animating the background. He proposed that the play of light throughout an act should express the mood and action. He wanted it to change with the development of the play. He made elaborate analyses of the Wagner music-dramas to show how the light could play a part—an active part—in the setting and the action.

During the next decade, the beginning of the twentieth century, an Italian named Fortuny began the first practical work of progress in stage lighting. Not very permanent work, perhaps, but certainly valuable because it struck out in new directions. His devices have all but disappeared from the German theater; but only because they have been replaced by improvements along the lines he indicated. Fortuny tried to improve the quality of the light by using indirect illumination. He threw light from powerful arcs against colored bands of silk, which reflected it onto the stage. This had two advantages. The light was diffused and broken up. The color could be controlled at a distance by cords that moved the various silk bands past the light. Fortuny also tried to improve the surface on which the light fell. He devised a domed silk sky or Kuppelhorizont, into which the greater part of his diffused light was thrown, to be diffused still further. Incidentally he hoped to achieve a better sky-effect. Disadvantages hampered both his devices. Indirect lighting required far more current than direct and created a great deal of heat. The dome was produced by exhausting air from between two curved surfaces of silk, the outer one fastened to a folding frame of steel; creases and joints showed in the silk and air was likely to leak in and collapse the sky.

In the course of another ten years engineering ingenuity supplied substitutes for both these elements of the Fortuny System. Most important was the discovery of how to manufacture incandescent bulbs almost as powerful as arc lights. Such bulbs, equipped with frosted glass and glass mediums or color screens, could not only supply light sufficiently diffused in tone and under easy control, but they also produced the shadows, as well as the light, which Appia wanted. The sky-dome became literally a fixture in the German theater when some one decided to make it out of plaster instead of silk. To-day the high-powered bulb and the plaster sky are everywhere in the German theater. Schwabe in Berlin and Phillips in Holland have succeeded in making bulbs of the enormous power of 3,000 watts or 6,000 candle-power, bulbs about three times as strong as any incandescent lights used in America in 1922. The dome, or some variety of it, is found in practically every German theater. Linnebach estimates that there are twenty true Kuppelhorizonts, cupping the whole stage with a curving dome; ten permanent Rundhorizonts, plaster cycloramas curving like a great semi-circular wall around the stage; and thirty canvas cycloramas which are quite as large as the Rundhorizont, and some of which are so hung as to make a most convenient and efficient substitute for either variety of plaster sky.

The most interesting and significant departures in the use of light on the Continental stage have to do with this substitute for the old backdrop. It began as an imitation of the sky, an attempt to put one more piece of Realism into the theater. It has got to the point now where its really interesting and important uses have nothing whatever to do with realistic fake-heavens. It is being employed as a formal element in a stage design, or else as a surface on which to paint scenery with light.

Perhaps it was economy, perhaps a flash of genius, but it occurred to the Germans that there was no particular necessity of lighting the dome or cyclorama. In these huge stages it stands at least sixty or seventy feet back of the footlights. It is possible, therefore, to make it a dim emptiness by merely turning off the lights that ordinarily shine upon it, or to give it some vague neutral quality from the light upon the stage which is reflected onto the Horizont. In Othello at the State Schauspielhaus in Berlin, Jessner uses his cyclorama, an ordinary canvas one, as a formal background bounding the space in which his strictly conventionalized indications of settings are placed. Thus it is in some scenes a pale neutral wall, in some a curious violet emptiness, in others a faintly salmon background, in still another a yellow light against which figures move in tiny silhouettes. At the Volksbühne in Masse-Mensch the dome becomes a misty void in one of the dream-scenes; and then upon this void move vast, mysterious shadows in circling procession.

Shadows on the dome carry us to a final development of lighting in Germany—the “projection” of scenery, the substitution of light for paint as a means of expression. Many minds have worked and are working on devices to be used for this purpose, but the most important mechanisms find their home in Dresden at the theaters of Linnebach and of Hasait.

As might be expected, Linnebach’s is the simpler. He has a dome in his theater, the State Schauspielhaus, and upon this dome or through varnished silk from the back, he throws, by means of a very simple lantern containing an arc light but no lenses, the designs painted on glass. This lantern and the transparent method of projection were used in America with much success by Lee Simonson when the New York Theater Guild mounted Shaw’s Back to Methuselah in the spring of 1922. Linnebach has made the mountains of Wilhelm Tell with projection and the settings of Grabbe’s Kaiser Heinrich VI, and of the expressionist dramas Das Bist Du, Gas, and Jenseits.

Hasait’s simplest method of projection brings you up sharp against the true origins of the thing, and they are almost as old as drama. The puppeteers of old Java had shadow-marionettes centuries before the technical director of the Dresden State Opera made shadow-settings. For Weber’s Oberon and for Mozart’s Zauberflöte, Hasait provides a plastic arrangement of inner proscenium and steps, with a translucent curtain at the back. From one side of the curtain he projects a design in shadows by means of a frame hardly two feet wide across which are fastened various thicknesses of gauze. The light that comes through the clearer portions of the gauze is one color, while from a light on the other side of the translucent curtain he stains the shadows with a second color. The hue of both these lights can be changed quickly or slowly as desired, producing harmonies and contrasts of color.

The other devices used by Hasait for projection are embodied in a scheme of stage equipment called the Ars System by the Swedish company that controls the patents for its exploitation abroad. The basis of the system is a canvas cyclorama. This cyclorama runs on a semi-circular track hung from the gridiron high above the stage. At one end of the track is a great roller upon which the cyclorama may be wound up, to get it out of the way during an elaborate change of scene. It takes only half a minute for the cyclorama to be run out on the track ready for use. The track itself may be swung downward from its two front corners to permit particularly large drops to be hoisted or lowered; but it is wide enough and deep enough not to interfere with the ordinary use of the gridiron. The cyclorama is made of common light canvas, but it is so cut and joined, and hung on a slight slant that it takes up of itself the bulges and wrinkles ordinarily produced in our cycloramas by a change in weather. The invention of this cyclorama is in dispute between those ancient but courteous rivals, Hasait and Linnebach.

With this cyclorama goes an elaborate system of lighting manufactured by Schwabe. There are floor lamps, contained in wheeled chariots, to illuminate the bottom of the cyclorama. Above the proscenium opening hangs a battery of different colored lights—seventy-two in the Stockholm State Opera—which play directly upon the cyclorama, and three high-powered bulbs to light the stage floor. Besides these, the Ars System, as installed at Stockholm, includes three special projection devices also hung above the proscenium, all the adjustments of which are controlled electro-magnetically from the switchboard. One of these is the large cloud-machine, an arrangement of two tiers of eight lamps each, raying out from a common axis. These tiers can move at different speeds and in different directions, while each lamp can be turned up and down and sideways at will. These projectors each house a 6,000 candle-power bulb and hold a photograph or drawing of a cloud. The complex motion of these static clouds when projected on the cyclorama gives an effect of every-varying cloud formations. Almost absolute Realism can thus be obtained. A second and smaller and less flexible cloud-machine with a single central lamp and reflecting mirrors is, for some reason, included in the equipment.

Besides these cloud-machines there is a battery of three high-powered bulbs and lenses, by means of which designs painted on glass slides may be projected after the fashion of a magic lantern upon the cyclorama or any object on the stage. This is the really important feature of the Ars System from an artistic standpoint. Its possibilities are extraordinary. Harald André, chief régisseur of the Stockholm Opera, has experimented little as yet with this device, utilizing it only in one ballet. But he has speculated much on the opportunities that it presents for uniting a large group of theaters, similarly equipped, in the exchange of scenic designs for the productions in their repertory. André believes that the economy of projected scenery is important artistically, as well as financially, because it will permit of experiment with many new works at slight expense, and of the rapid reproduction of the successful pieces in many cities at once.

From the absolute, artistic viewpoint of the effect obtained, projection is most satisfactory, though as yet almost undeveloped. Americans who saw the translucent projections of Simonson’s designs in Back to Methuselah realized how little these drops had the visual disadvantages of the painted variety. They enjoyed a certain incorporeal quality. The landscapes were not defined like huge oil paintings in false perspective. They went into some new category which, for the moment, defeated our analysis. Such projections may in time take on the shallow pretense of painted backdrops, though I am inclined to doubt it.

In the case of the Valhalla of Das Rheingold, as projected in Linnebach’s production at the National Theater in Munich, the ethereal quality of this kind of “painting” again stands out. The scene is most successful when the lighting is dimmest. In the central portions of the second and fourth scenes, when the stage is fully lighted, the image of Valhalla holds its own against the illumination of the foreground, but the foreground itself fails dismally to match the beauty of the gods’ castle. When the plastic foreground is not to be seen, Valhalla hangs in the heavens like one of the shapes of Wilfred’s Color Organ, a thing that seems to have three dimensions. When the lights upon the stage floor bring out the rocks of the foreground, Valhalla loses the reality of three dimensions. It still seems truer, as well as more beautiful, than the rocks in front. In fact it shows up pitilessly the trivial canvas life of those boulders. But it loses the impression of depth, which it had at first created. This was doubtless a false impression, a foolish illusion.

The projected setting is certainly in another dimension spiritually from those two ordinarily employed in old-fashioned scene painting. It is not in any of the planes of stage-rocks or houses. It does not, however, war with the human figure, curiously enough. It seems likely that the artist or director using projected design must formalize his foreground, as Simonson did, or else hide its commonplace actuality in shadow. Ordinary stage pretenses cannot stand beside the spiritual plastics produced by light.

As for the cloud-machine, so long as it is trying merely to reproduce nature it is utterly unimportant. Something imaginative must be done with it before it can expect serious consideration. In the productions of André at the Stockholm Opera there are at least two hints that the cloud-machine can be used for the purposes of art. One of these, rather poorly managed, is the use of designed clouds instead of natural clouds in one of the scenes of Samson and Delilah. The other, not perfectly executed by any means, but most suggestive, occurs in Verdi’s Macbeth. There in the first scene André sets a wild storm sky in motion. He uses negative or black photographs of clouds instead of positive or white, and he starts them moving from on high and at the sides, sweeping in and down upon the witches. As these dark shapes descend in tumult, it seems as though the black earth were drinking black clouds, curious and evil portent of the powers of the infernal.

Movement in projection has obviously great possibilities as part of the action of new drama. In Kaiser’s expressionist play From Morn to Midnight, produced by the Theater Guild, Simonson used Linnebach’s lantern to make the tree in the snow scene change into a skeleton, an effect that Kaiser was able to foresee only as a shifting of snowflakes upon naked boughs.

Light itself seems destined to assume a larger and larger part in the drama. It is a playing force, quite as much as the actors. It can be a motivator of action as well as an illuminator of it. Jessner at the State Schauspielhaus in Berlin uses it as an arbitrary accompaniment and interpreter of action. Lights flash on or off as some mood changes. They create shadows to dramatize a relation of two men. They seem to control or to be controlled by the action. The extent to which a change of light may express the dramatist’s conception is most interestingly suggested in the scene of Macbeth’s death in André’s production of the opera. It is an uncommonly well handled scene in all respects, perhaps the best example of this director’s fine imagination. The fight between the armies begins in a gray light before the walls of Dunsinane. There is no absurd effort of supers to look like death-crazed warriors. The quality of pursuit and conflict is caught in the pose of the bands of the soldiers as they run past the walls bent down like dogs upon a blood-scent. Macbeth and Macduff meet for a clear moment of conflict, then they are surrounded and covered by the troops that rush to see their champions do battle. At the moment when Macbeth falls, the crowd clears for a moment. And then the grayness of morning breaks sharply into dawn as evil goes out of the play. An obvious symbolism, perhaps, but obviousness is not so great a failing in the theater. The fault of the scene is only in André’s over-emphasis upon the light, or rather his under-emphasis upon the cause of the light—the death of Macbeth. At the moment when the light goes on, there should come some supreme, arresting gesture, something to absorb every atom of our attention so that we may wonderingly discover the light as a thing caused by Macbeth, not by an electrician.

Such a scene suggests wide possibilities. Light as the compelling force of a play; light as a motivator of action; light and setting, not as a background to action, but as part of it, as something making characters exist and act; light as an almost physical aura of human bodies; light, therefore, in conflict. Physical contacts are not a necessity of the theater. Under Jessner, the murderer of Clarence in Richard III does not try to seem to stab him; he simply plunges the dagger at him. That is enough. In Francesca da Rimini as Duse sometimes gave it, I have heard that when the husband killed Paola with his sword the space of the whole room separated them. It was as if the sword possessed an aura, and as if the aura slew. In Masse-Mensch the crowd of revolutionaries go down to the mere rattle of machine guns before the curtains are drawn to show the soldiers.

If light can do such things, even if it can do no more than signal the downfall of evil or set Valhalla glowing in the heavens, it will take a place in the theater that no other product of inventive ingenuity can reach. Light, at the very least, is machinery spiritualized.