In Vienna on Christmas Day, 1921, there were no matches in the match-stands of the cafés and no paper in the hotel writing rooms. Some of the well-to-do and the recklessly soft-hearted had begun to feel that they could afford to keep pet dogs again; but there were no silk stockings on those most un-Teuton ankles that paraded the Burgring. You may guess, therefore, that there was no butter on the tables of the middle classes, and no milk in the houses of those who, by a curious clairvoyance of language, are called the working people.

Two nights later three or four hundred citizens, with bits of bread and meat wrapped in paper and stowed in their pockets, could be seen seated in a great and splendid ballroom of Maria Theresa’s palace, under the light of crystal chandeliers and the glow of priceless Gobelins, watching the first performance, The Marriage of Figaro, in a theater a stride ahead of any in Europe.

They had paid good money at one of the doors of that extraordinary old building, the Hofburg, which rambles from the Opera to the Burgtheater half across the shopping district of Vienna. After they had parted from two or three thousand crowns apiece, they had wound up stone stairways between white walls and twists of old ironwork, passed through cloakrooms where princesses once left their wraps, and a supper room where artists may cheerfully go mad over molding, pediment and mirror, and reached at last the Theater in dem Redoutensaal. They found one of the handsomest baroque rooms in Europe holding within its beauty both a stage and an auditorium. A row of Gobelin tapestries filled the lower reaches of the walls. Above were moldings and pilasters, cornices and pargeting, spandrels and pediments, fillets and panelling, an ordered richness of ornament that held suspended in its gray and golden haze mirrors that echoed beauty, and chandeliers radiant with light. At one end of the room, beneath great doors and a balcony which the architect had planned in 1744, was a new structure; it broke the line of the Gobelins, but continued the panelling, freshened to cream and gold, in a curving wall across a platform and in double stairs leading to the balcony. With man’s unfailing instinct for the essence of life, the audience promptly identified this roofless shell as a stage. There was a platform, of course, but there was no proscenium. There were doors and windows in the curving wall, but no woodwings, borders, flats, or backdrops. There was even a something along the front of the platform which might conceal footlights, but there was nothing to be seen that looked more like scenery than a row of screens.

Such is the room in which the forces of the Austrian State Opera House have been giving The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville, and in which Reinhardt began late in 1922 the most interesting experiment of his most experimental life—the presentation of plays under a unique condition of theatrical intimacy between actor and audience.

It is an odd spectacle, this of Vienna, the bankrupt, going lightheartedly out on the most advanced experiment in production yet attempted in Europe. One of its oddest angles is that the man who made an empress’s ballroom over into a theater is a socialist—President Vetter of the Staatstheaterverwaltung, the bureau under the republic which controls the State playhouses. The conversion was not an easy matter. Opponents rose up inside the State theaters and outside them. Vienna was engaged for months upon one of those artistic quarrels from which it is always drawing new health and spirit.

When President Vetter had won his point he plunged briskly ahead at the work of making over the ballroom into a very special kind of theater without marring its beauty. Part of the old balcony came out, mirrors replaced doors and windows down the sides of the hall, and Oberbaurat Sebastien Heinrich set to work on the problem of creating a permanent architectural setting for the stage which should harmonize with the lovely room, yet stand out from it significantly enough to center attention on the acting space. Meantime President Vetter took another look at the Gobelins which had satisfied Maria Theresa, and decided that they weren’t quite good enough; others had to be found. Even now he is a little doubtful about those on the right hand wall.

The work of the Oberbaurat is admirable. He has continued the molding above the Gobelins, and made it the top of the curving wall which is the background for the stage. This shell is broken at each side by a casement, which holds either a door or a window, and two masked openings. Through one of these, close to the front of the stage, a curtain the height of the wall is run out to hide changes in the screens and furniture upon the stage. At the back, where the shell curves close to the old balcony of the ballroom, the State architect has placed a pair of graceful steps, which meet at the top, and provide, underneath, an exit to the rear. For lighting, there are the foots in their unobtrusive trough, and small floods placed in the gap where the curtain moves; but by far the larger part of the illumination comes from the seven chandeliers in the ceiling of the hall. The chandeliers towards the rear are sometimes turned half down or even off, but essentially it is the same light which illumines both players and audience.

This light and the formal and permanent character of the stage stamp the Redoutensaal with a character as old as it is fresh. This theater goes beyond Copeau’s Vieux-Colombier in the attempt to re-establish in our century that active relationship between actor and spectator which existed in the great theaters of other centuries, and towards which the finest minds of the theater have been striving. Here is a stage freed from all the associations of modern stage-setting, innocent of machinery or illusions, essentially theatrical. Actors must be actors upon its boards. They cannot try to represent actual people; they can only present themselves to the audience as artists who will give them a vision of reality.

This is comparatively easy in opera. There is no realistic illusion about a valet who sings a soliloquy on his master’s more intimate habits. People who quarrel in verse to a merry tune are most unlikely to be mistaken for the neighbors next door. With music and the stage of the Redoutensaal to aid them, the singers of the State Opera manage to give a roughly presentational performance. In direction there is nothing notable to be seen, unless it is the wedding scene of Figaro with the Count striding up and down across the front of the stage, opposed in figure and in action to the plaguing women above upon the stairs. The acting possibilities of this stage, however, are very great. Reinhardt saw them vividly in the summer of 1922, while he was making preparations for his five productions in September: Turandot by Gozzi, Stella and Clavigor by Goethe, Le Misanthrope by Molière, and Dame Cobalt by Calderon. He saw the possibilities and the difficulties of acting also, and he rejoiced that he was to have old and tried associates like Moissi, Pallenberg and Krauss with him once more when he began his experiment with a theater far more exacting than the Grosses Schauspielhaus, and a technique of acting very hard to regain after so many years of Realism.

So far as there must be indications of time and place upon this stage, a beginning in experiment has been made. It has not been a particularly good beginning, but it shows the opportunities for the artist, and also the limitations. They are very nearly identical. It is the business of the scene designer who works here to draw from the Redoutensaal itself the motifs and colors which he shall add to the permanent setting. It is his privilege, using only these things, to give the scene just the fillip of interest which the play demands.

Alfred Roller, a veteran of the scenic revolt of fifteen years ago, and, next to Reinhardt’s artist, Ernst Stern, the most distinguished German scenic designer of his time, has made the screens and set pieces for The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville. There is little or no good to be said of his work in the latter piece. The screens with which he indicates a room in the first act, and the bulky gate which he sets down across the stairs in the second act, are bad as to color, and quite at odds with the Redoutensaal. Obviously he could have made so much more amusing a gate out of the permanent stairs, and given his scene a Spanish stamp by a circle of vivid, tight-packed flowers in the center. The Marriage of Figaro is much better, though here again Roller could have done far better if he had turned his eyes up to the walls above him. The first scene, the servant’s room, is made by a row of antique screens of faded crimson placed well down stage. Through a door in the central one, you see green screens, which, in the second scene are to define the room of the wife. With an excellent sense of climax, Roller proceeds from the shallow stage of the first scene to the deeper stage of the second, and finally sweeps in the whole permanent setting for the wedding in the third scene. More than that, he calls the stairs and balcony into play, and finally opens the great doors above the balcony to let us see beyond to a room of crimson hangings and more crystal. The last scene, the garden, is shoddily conceived, with a few uninteresting potted trees, a bad painting of Schönbrunn in the exit under the steps, and a sickly attempt at moonlight from the floodlights and foots. Why not, you wonder, delicate, artificial, gilded hedges along the walls, and fruit trees flattened on espaliers against the steps?

Unquestionably the lighting problem in the Redoutensaal is not yet solved. Reinhardt looks to solve it with a large light or two concealed in the forward chandeliers. This may make the illumination of the stage a little more flexible and expressive; but it is quite as likely that the way to light the stage is without the least pretense at illusion. At any rate footlights and lights from the side are distressing reminders of the conventional theater.

Almost as reminiscent is the curtain which slides out between acts while the stage hands move the screens. Why a curtain at all—unless the curtain of darkness? Why not uniformed attendants managing the simple matter of screens or small set pieces with the aplomb of actors? Or if there must be a curtain, why a crimson sheet; why not a hanging whose folds continue the motif of the Gobelins at each side?

Perhaps the most serious question concerned with the physical arrangements of this stage is whether there should not be some scheme of levels other than floor and balcony. A lower forestage would aid the director in composing his people, and getting movement and variety out of this fixed and therefore limited setting. It would also aid an audience that is seated almost on a flat floor.

The sceptic may find other limitations in the Redoutensaal. And he will be right if he points out that its atmosphere is too sharply artificial in its distinction to permit every sort of play to be given here. Gorky’s Night Lodging might be played in the Redoutensaal as a literally tremendous tour de force, but it would be in the face of spiritual war between the background of the stage and the physical horrors of the slums which the play describes. Plays for the Redoutensaal must have some quality of distinction about them, a great, clear emotion free from the bonds of physical detail, a fantasy or a poetry as shining as crystal, some artificiality of mood, or else an agreement in period with the baroque. You can imagine Racine or Corneille done perfectly here, Euripides only by great genius, The Weavers not at all. Nothing could suit Molière better, or Beaumarchais or the Restoration dramatists. Shakespeare could contribute Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, perhaps Romeo and Juliet, but never Hamlet. Here, of course, is a perfect stage for Oscar Wilde, a good stage for Somerset Maugham, A. A. Milne, some of Clare Kummer. The Moscow Art Theater would have no trouble with The Cherry Orchard. More or less at random, you think of Bahr’s Josephine, The School for Scandal, The Sabine Women, Lysistrata, The Mollusc, A Marriage of Convenience, The Truth, Prunella, The Beggar’s Opera. The one impossible barrier to performance in the Redoutensaal is Atmosphere. If a play is drenched in the emotions of firesides, poppy fields, moonlit gardens or natural physical things, it is impossible here.

These are the limitations of the Redoutensaal, not of its idea. The permanent setting and its enclosing hall can take the shapes of other periods and meet almost every demand of the drama except atmosphere. Ideally the hall should have some sober yet arresting architecture common to many periods. A neutral order of this sort might be the blank Roman arches and plain pilasters which are seen so often in modern buildings. The chandeliers might take a form less ornate and less blazing; nuances of lighting, if desirable, might then be achieved. More important, however, would be to have three interchangeable shells and steps. One set of walls should be classical and severe, suited to Greek tragedy, Julius Cæsar, and, with a bit of brightening, to Shaw’s Cæsar and Cleopatra. Another shell should strike the note of artificial distinction with which the Redoutensaal now echoes. The third should be of dark, paneled wood, to suit Shakespearean tragedy, the comedy of Goldsmith, and modern pieces from Rosmersholm to Getting Married and from Alice Sit-by-the-Fire to Magda.

The idea of a permanent room in which to act a related repertory is thoroughly applicable even to our peepshow playhouses with their prosceniums. It would be possible to install a shell or room on the stage of any reasonably presentable theater, such as Henry Miller’s, the Little, the Booth, the Plymouth, the Selwyn in New York, the Künstler in Munich, the Volksbühne, the Kammerspiele in Berlin, the Comédie des Champs-Elysées in Paris, St. Martin’s in London. The room would have to be formal, probably without a ceiling, and certainly far more like a wall than a room. Such a compromise seems the only chance America may have of experimenting with the idea of the Redoutensaal. There is nowhere in this country a room so naturally fitted to the purpose by its beauty as was the ballroom of the Hapsburgs. The building of a fresh structure is a little too much to ask; for we have hardly the directors or actors to launch unpractised upon such a costly and critical test. It might be risked perhaps, as Frank Lloyd Wright proposed risking it, in a theater of a purely artistic nature far from Broadway. Wright designed for Aline Barnsdall a playhouse to be erected in California, with an adjustable proscenium, a stage with a dome that all but continued over the auditorium, and, upon the stage, a plain curving wall some ten feet high, following the shape of the dome. The nearest analogy to the Redoutensaal that has been actually attempted in America is probably the adaptation which Director Sam Hume and the artists Rudolph Schaeffer and Norman Edwards made of the Greek Theater in Berkeley, California, for Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night. There is a certain significance, however, in the pleasure which our scenic artists seem to get out of a play which gives them only one setting to design, but which requires them to wring from it, by means of lights, many moods and a variety of visual impressions. Lee Simonson’s circus greenroom for He Who Gets Slapped and Norman-Bel Geddes’ sitting room for The Truth About Blayds showed how seductive to the artist of the theater may be the game of playing with lights in a permanent setting.

Approached purely from the point of view of scenic art, or the so-called new stagecraft, the Redoutensaal presents excellent reasons for its existence. Historically it could be defended by a study of the theater from the Greeks, with their day-lit, architectural background, to Georgian times when the stage and the house were both lighted by the same chandeliers, and the wide apron, the boxes, and the proscenium made a sort of permanent setting which was varied by the shifting backcloths. But if we go no further back than the days when Craig and Appia were beginning to write, and before their voices and their pencils had won an audience among theater directors, we shall find the start of an evolutionary development for which the idea of the Redoutensaal provides a plausible climax. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the “flat” was flat indeed, and the painted wing and backdrop ruled. If there was any depth, it was the space between wing and wing, or the false space of painted perspective. Then the ideas of Craig and Appia, making a curious alliance with Realism, forced the plastic upon the stage. The solid, three-dimensional setting dominated. When directors and artists began to discover the physical and spiritual limitations of “real” settings which could present nothing bigger than the actual stage space, many went back to the painted flat. It was a different flat, however, one painted with dynamic and expressive design. The third method is seldom quite satisfactory. The living actor, with his three-dimensional being, clashes with the two-dimensional painting. The result is bad from a realistic or illusionistic point of view; and, as soon as we think of the stage in terms of a frank convention, we find that we want the emphasis thrown upon the actor as the more interesting and the more difficult element. We want a defined and permanent artificiality that shall give the actor scope, serve as a pied-à-terre, not join in a fantastic competition. We can escape plastic and limited reality in the Redoutensaal, while we supply the actor with a background that harmonizes with the living character of his body. At the same time we can secure the vivid indication of mood or time or place which we seek, and achieve it more vividly because of the permanence of the main fabric of the stage, and its contrast with the merely indicated setting.

German scene designers and directors move in theory steadily towards what they call the podium, the platform pure and simple, from which the player addresses the audience openly as a player. In practice they tend steadily to try to approach this by driving out as much of changing scenic background as possible. They place something in the middle of the stage, a table, a flight of steps, a pillar, a bed, and they try to eliminate the rest of the stage. Jessner does this in Berlin by using his cyclorama as a neutral boundary without character in itself. Fehling, the director of Masse-Mensch, uses black curtains, and the artist Krehan by the same means tries to center our attention on small set pieces placed in the middle of the stage and designed to represent corners of rooms or a sofa by a window. Black curtains appear everywhere in Germany—perhaps as an expression of the mood of the beaten nation, but also unquestionably from a desire to drive out both Realism and pretense and to leave as little as possible upon the stage except the actor and the barest and most essential indication of setting. The German uses black curtains to achieve nothingness. Instead he gets desolation, spiritual negation. In the Redoutensaal, the actor is backed up by space. It is a positive presence instead of a negative background. Yet it does not obtrude, this splendid room, with its gold and gray, its mirrors and its tapestries. These things float in the back of consciousness, filling what might be a disquieting void or a depressing darkness. Always the cream walls dominate the gray, and always the living actor, driving his message directly at the spectator, dominates them all.