Continental stagecraft

BY KENNETH MACGOWAN THE THEATRE OF TO-MORROW.
The Redoutensaal, a great and splendid eighteenth-century ballroom in the Hofburg in Vienna, with an arrangement of curved walls, staircases and platforms newly built into one end. Here, under the light of crystal chandeliers, surrounded by the baroque beauty of Maria Theresa’s palace, audience and players unite in a relationship freed from all the associations of modern stage-setting, a relationship essentially theatrical in the newest and the oldest sense of the word. The stage is here shown cleared of all but a few chairs for the wedding scene in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro .
KENNETH MACGOWAN ROBERT EDMOND JONES
NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO THE PLAYWRIGHTS OF AMERICA
Certain of the chapters and illustrations of Continental Stagecraft have appeared in Vanity Fair , The Century Magazine , Arts and Decoration , The Bookman , The Theatre Magazine , Harper’s Bazaar , The Theatre Arts Magazine , The Freeman , and Shadowland .
This book is a record of impressions gained from ten weeks of travel through the theaters of France, Sweden, Germany, Czecho-Slovakia, and Austria during April, May, and June, 1922. These impressions are partly reinforced, partly orientated, through previous visits to Paris and London, and through a long sojourn of Mr. Jones in Germany just before the war.
For the purposes of this book, the journey excluded England, because observation and reliable report showed little there that was not a faint echo of what was to be found on the Continent. Russia was regretfully excluded for reasons of time and the difficulties of travel; but fortunately we were able to see in Stockholm a performance by the touring company of the Moscow Art Theater. Though the most interesting evenings of our trip were spent in the Redoutensaal in Vienna, and in the Vieux-Colombier and the Cirque Medrano in Paris, the larger part of our time was passed in Germany, and the greater number of illustrations come from productions seen there. In Berlin, in particular, there were things to be seen which had been much discussed by American visitors— Masse-Mensch , the Grosses Schauspielhaus, and the work of Leopold Jessner,—and these, we felt, demanded lengthy study and analysis.