Size is no mania with the French. They do not insist on buildings that are taller than those of any other nation, an empire that is larger, ambitions and dreams mightier and more terrible. So perhaps it was only natural that when a Frenchman wanted to present actors in a new relationship to their audience, he should choose for his theater a little hall in the Street of the Old Dovecot instead of a circus or a park.

Doubtless there were many reasons why Jacques Copeau’s theater had to be small. A potent one may have been economy, a thing that accounts for the little theater movement far more than any theories of intimacy. The question of repertory also may have had weight. There are many sizes of drama, and there are special repertories for special theaters; but many more plays are possible for a theater of five hundred seats than for a theater of five thousand. The Trojan Women can be played to one hundred and twenty-nine people in the Toy Theater of Boston, as Maurice Browne proved; but Le Misanthrope is impossible in the Yale Bowl.

Copeau’s theater had to be small, not only because he had little money and a great love of all sorts of plays, but also because—and this counted more than even the French liking for the moderate and the exact—the thing he was interested in was the actor and not a grandiose idea. He ended by creating the first presentational playhouse in the modern world, by maintaining for a long time the most radical, and by achieving after some years the most successful. But he began by looking for some place for his actors to act. They were to be a company of fresh, sensitive, intelligent spirits bringing an intense and honest art to those who might care for it. Copeau had found his actors in all manner of places besides the routine theaters. He had talked to them about everything but make-up, curtain calls, and how to be natural on the stage. He had played with them and worked with them in the country, rehearsing the first pieces of the repertory in a barn. He did not intend to dump them down into one of the ordinary theaters of Paris. Copeau proposed to take the hall that his resources permitted, and to make it over to suit the spirit of his company. He could build no ideal theater, but he could make one in which his actors would escape the realisms and the pretenses of the modern theater, and would play to and with the audience as their spirit demanded.

And so we have the Théâter du Vieux-Colombier. It is not at all like the hideous theater-hall that was there before. It is not quite as it was when Copeau closed his first season before the war. It is not in the least like the Garrick Theater, which he remade in New York in 1917; as a matter of fact it is not so good. It is not very charming in its shape or its decorations, and Copeau is as careless as Reinhardt about things like good painting and clean walls. But this Vieux-Colombier is a distinguished and a jolly place all the same, the happiest and the healthiest theater west of Vienna.

It is hard to know where to begin a description of this curious playhouse. Suppose you had never been to the Vieux-Colombier, but suppose you knew that this was a theater without the illusion of Realism, and suppose you sought for the thing that would tell you this the quickest. What would you see? Probably the steps that lead from the stage to the forestage, and even from the forestage to the seats of the audience. There are no footlights, and so you have the pleasure of seeing the square, firm edge where the stage floor ends. This edge bends into a large curve in the middle, with three curved steps below, and it angles out at the sides to where smaller steps join those of the middle on an ample forestage. These steps and the edge of the stage do more than any one thing in the theater to signal that you are not looking into a picture-frame. Even when they are not used, as in Les Frères Karamazov, these steps keep you warily alive to that fact.

When you examine the theater more closely you discover that there is no proscenium. The nearest thing to it is the last of the arches which hold up the roof of the auditorium. There is a curtain, to be sure, but it does not fall behind pillars, and it does not cover the forestage. It descends at that point where the walls of the auditorium become the walls of the stage, and it merely serves to hide one end of this long room while the stage hands make small changes in the permanent setting.

The permanent setting, like the theater itself, is an experimental product of the attempt to provide what the actors need. It is really no more than a balcony placed against the back wall, with an arched opening in the middle, and with walls at the sides that let the actors, who have gone out through the arch, get off stage unseen. This balcony is so solidly built that it cannot be taken out, but certain portions are alterable. The changes in setting are managed by changing the width of the arch or the line of the top of the balcony, by adding doors, steps at one side, or railings, and particularly by placing significant properties or screens upon the stage. Louis Jouvet, stage director as well as Copeau’s best actor, has done many ingenious things to make his settings varied enough and characteristic enough without losing the permanent thing that is common to them all, and that aids in banishing realistic illusion. A detail that shows the working of his mind is to be found in the screens that he uses to create a room in Les Frères Karamazov; by giving them two or three inches of thickness and a certain amount of molding, he has escaped the impression of the bare, the unsubstantial, and the untheatrical which the screens of other designers produce.

The balcony is a most useful feature. It was not accident that put a balcony in the Elizabethan theater or made the Greeks use the theologium. It serves a practical purpose, of course, in any scheme of permanent setting, for it makes it unnecessary to build balconies for scenes that especially call for them. A good deal more important to the director is the movement up and down, as well as sideways and back and forth, which it gives him. With the forestage, the main stage, and the balcony, Copeau has almost as useful a base for composing action in three dimensions as Jessner has in the steps which he uses in various productions in Berlin.

Sheldon Cheney has called Copeau’s stage a “naked stage.” It is a happy accident of language that, when you call it a concrete stage, you describe the material of which it is made and the feeling of sharp, definite statement which resides in everything done upon it. The wall at the right of the audience is solid, the wall at the back, too; the ceiling of the stage has some openings between steel girders, but it is more like the floor than the “flies” of the average theater. Only in the left wall of the stage are there any openings. Through these the actors manage to exit into the next building. The floor of the stage, except at the edges, is even more adamant. It will not yield to pleas for atmosphere, illusion or any of the gewgaws of our theater. It is solid concrete. Copeau wanted to give the actor’s feet a sense of support which they cannot get from yielding and resounding wood. At the sides is a small section in timber which permits the use of a stairway to a lower room as in The S. S. Tenacity or Les Frères Karamazov. In the forestage are two other openings, covered by wooden and concrete slabs.

Jouvet’s lighting system is ingenious and philosophically sound, if not altogether perfect. Practically all the light comes from four large lamps hung in the auditorium. They replace footlights, borderlights, and floods from the sides. Illumination from the auditorium itself is essential to good stage lighting; the footlights are an unhappy makeshift. David Belasco very wisely uses a battery of lamps hidden in the face of the first balcony. In German theaters, the huge 6000-candlepower bulbs developed since the war, tempt directors to inefficient and distracting lighting from the ventilator above the main chandelier in the roof of the auditorium. Neither the latter method nor Belasco’s is wholly satisfactory in a theater that forswears representation, a theater like the Grosses Schauspielhaus or the Vieux-Colombier or the Redoutensaal in Vienna. Electric light on the stage begins as an imitation of the real. If a table is illuminated by a large light in the first border, there must be a lamp above the table in such a position as to suggest that it is doing all the work. The next step is to use light for illumination and composition—for beauty, in fact—without bothering to try to make it seem to come from some natural source in the setting. When such light comes from the auditorium we may get composition, but we also get a throw-back to the source of the light itself. The ray carries our eye up to some lens-lamp trying unsuccessfully to hide in the bottom of the dome of the Grosses Schauspielhaus, or in the top of the ceiling of the Burgtheater. A new problem arises. It should be answered by making the source frankly visible. The hoods themselves of large bulbs have a shape that would make them interesting and not without significance in the Grosses Schauspielhaus; or a new shape could be supplied to harmonize with architecture or setting. In the Redoutensaal we find glorious old crystal chandeliers lighting the stage—an accidental result of the fact that the Viennese government converted Maria Theresa’s ballroom into a playhouse. In the Vieux-Colombier Jouvet makes no bones about admitting where his light is coming from. He places the bulbs in octagonal lanterns, which, by revolving on an axis, present different colored sides for the light to pass through; the lanterns may also be moved in such directions as to throw the light upon any desired part of the stage. These lanterns are frankly visible; and, though they are not a pleasing shape, they fit esthetically with the theory of this theater. Here is electric lighting presented at last as the thing it really is, not as an imitation of something else.

The greatest faults of the Vieux-Colombier over which Copeau had control, and which he could easily have avoided, lie in the color and quality of painting on the stage. The concrete and the cream of the auditorium take warm lights; but in portions of the stage itself, Copeau has used a cold gray that is surely unfortunate. Much that you see is shoddy. If the paint chips off a corner, nobody bothers to replace it. Rivet heads and structural iron show when they have no relation to the shapes on the stage. Now it is a good thing not to spend too much energy on the physical side of the theater, but there is a difference between austerity and slovenliness.

Actual productions, animated by the actors and graced with some of Jouvet’s scenic arrangements, do a great deal to make the stage wholly attractive. The S. S. Tenacity, a realistic play with a French café for its setting, makes interesting demands on this non-realistic stage. The demands are met, and met successfully. There is a counter at one side with racks for bottles, a wooden door in the arch at the back, a table in the center, and above it—the mark of Realism—a shaded lamp, from which a great deal of the stage light comes. With the actors giving us the sense of French life which was missing in the New York and Viennese productions, we have here a performance which might almost be enclosed in a proscenium frame. But there is in the acting, as in the setting, much that is non-realistic, much that seems representational only by contrast with the dominating spirit and physique of the theater and its people.

In the playlet that goes with The S. S. Tenacity, Mérimée’s Le Carrosse du St.-Sacrement, we are back in a piece from the romantic period, a comedy of clear and artificial vigor. A screen and some hangings with a southern flash to them set the stage for eighteenth-century Peru. Copeau himself has the same Punch-like visage that he presents to you in his own study, but now he manages to make you think him a Spanish puppet, an exasperated and wily doll. The same Punch appears in Les Frères Karamazov, but a Punch of the intellect, a tragic marionette dangling on the strings of rationalism. At the end, when Ivan goes mad, you may see most clearly the subtle exaggeration which is at the heart of the acting of Copeau’s company. The whirling body, the legs that beat a crazy tattoo on the floor, the twisting head and the boggling eyes, are none of them copied from a candidate for the asylum. They are all an explanation of what sort of lines in the figure of a crazy man would strike the imagination, what angles and movements would most sharply indicate lunacy.

Karamazov is effectively composed on this stage by a few draperies for the first scene, a line of curtains hiding the whole stage and begging the question in the second scene, a flight of steps for the hall of the Karamazovs, and two heavy screens for the inn. There is nothing so fine as the interminable steps that lead up from the balcony at the Garrick to the wretched room of Smerdiakov; but there is enough improvement in the very excellent acting seen in New York, to make up for this. Jouvet’s father is gigantically good; set beside his Aguecheek, it puts this young man among the most interesting actors of Europe. Paul Œttly, as the eldest brother, plays the striking scene in the inn of the gypsies with uncommon vigor, and the stage direction sweeps the scene along to a burning climax. The intensity of the actors in this play, added to the intensity of the play itself, demonstrates how completely a formal theater of this kind, and a type of acting which is a reasoned sort of explanation, rather than a thing of life or of acting, can stand up beside the Realism of our directors when it is at its best.

In Twelfth Night you find the company clear out of the shackles of realistic or semi-realistic plays, and happy in the beautiful playhouse of fantasy. And here the quality of exposition—which you may trace back to Copeau’s profession of critic, and forward through the days given to the reading and study and analysis of each new play—has almost altogether disappeared. The playing is spontaneous, or it is nothing. Suzanne Bing’s Viola is a-quiver with radiance and wonder. Jean Le Goff’s Orsino is no such God-favored performance, but his eyes are lit with an ecstasy of love-sickness. The comedians are far from Englishmen; but their creations are immensely funny: Jouvet’s gently gawking Aguecheek, Romain Bouquet’s shaven-headed, almost Oriental Sir Toby, Robert Allard’s extraordinary clown, the finest either of us had ever seen. It is interesting, for once, to see Malvolio put in his place as a character, and not given the star’s spotlight to preen in; it might be a more satisfactory arrangement if Albert Savry could be funnier in his dry Puritanism.

Twelfth Night triumphs at the Vieux-Colombier by virtue of the spirit of the actors, and the vision of the director. The costuming is bad—an unsuccessful attempt to make Illyria, as it might well be, a land of no time or place but Poetry; and the setting is no more than bright and freakish in a Greenwich Village way. But in the costumes and up and down the setting these players frisk, weaving patterns of beauty and fun that link them into the true spirit of the play. The curtain is there at convenient times to make the forestage into a neutral zone for duke or sea captain, and between this forestage and the balconied space behind there is room for all of Shakespeare’s play to race along just as he wrote it. With the trap door in the forestage to act as cellar, Malvolio can be incarcerated below-stairs and happily out of sight—much as Shakespeare intended.

Copeau is a believer in gymnastics. (He is also a believer in improvisation, a school of playwrights, and other things whose absence makes him grow impatient with his theater). Through months and years of strenuous labor, he is training half a dozen young people of his own school to have bodies that are as well under control as a gymnast’s. The performances of the Vieux-Colombier draw on players not so well trained, but they show what physical command can accomplish. Here you see acting that makes you think again of sculpture and its relation to the new theater.

Copeau’s people can meet the test which the theater with a Greek orchestra, like the Grosses Schauspielhaus, exacts. They can play “in the round.” Their bodies can be seen from all sides, and still keep expressiveness and beauty. They have learned to master their bodies, as well as their voices, and they are able to make the lines of arms and torsos and knees speak directly to the audience. When Jouvet sharply underlines and almost caricatures the salient shape of old Karamazov he is able to escape from ordinary representation, which may or may not make its point, and he is able to push his conception of the wicked, vital old man into almost direct physical contact with the audience. I have often wondered when the actor would learn the lesson of sculpture. There were centuries of almost literal representation, with the inner expression of the artist and the artist’s sense of Form struggling furiously to impose itself upon Reality, and failing more often than succeeding. Then, with Rodin came the sense that sculpture could make representation a distinctly secondary matter. There could be expression first, and resemblance afterwards, if at all. Idea, which is one sort of Form, enters the clay with Stanislas Szukalsky. Expression and idea, poised in the human body, begin to inform acting directly and openly in the company of the Vieux-Colombier. The first presentational theater adds the medium of the body to the medium of the voice.