Music after the great war, and other studies

by Carl Van Vechten

This is said, taking into account scenery which has scarcely any plastic features—such scenery, for instance, as is used to a great extent at the Metropolitan Opera House, where rocks and rills, woods, templed hills and marble halls are painted on flimsy drops. In palaces the architectural features are depicted in the same naïve way, using the word naïve in its worst sense. I believe that scenery like this is intended to represent the real thing just as much as a papier-mâché mill which crushes the villain in a melodrama, and it succeeds just as much.

This art, I think, came from Italy. At least, most of the scenery that is painted in this fashion, or the inspiration for it, comes from there nowadays. May it not be possible that it is suggested to the scene-painter by the houses one sees in the small Italian towns, where windows with shutters often are painted on the façade? The fantasy of some of these windows is sublime. Occasionally, persons are painted looking out of them. Dogs sit on the sills; I have seen peacocks. In some instances the whole architecture is painted on the outside of the house—columns, balconies, and all. This is a familiar enough device in Italian churches, and I fancy many Catholic churches in America may show traces of the style.

Carl Hagemann of Germany tries to get away from this sort of thing, just as David Belasco has tried to in New York, by making his whole scene plastic, every object built separately inside of a sky drop which runs around from one proscenium arch to the other. If he uses a house or a tree or a bench, it is not painted on the drop. It is built. In the case of interiors his task is easier, of course.

This method of procedure has two distinct disadvantages. In the first place, it takes away all the charm of suggestion, which I think should play an important part in theatrical entertainment, and in the second place, it does away with the possibility of producing a play with more than one scene in each act, unless the producer happens to have a revolving stage in his theatre, an equipment, by the way, which every playhouse in New York should possess. Hagemann gave Goethe’s Faust, which has countless scenes, by means of a revolving stage. He has produced Shakespearean plays in this manner. Mr. Belasco has followed Hagemann’s method pretty closely in some of his recent productions. The Auctioneer is a play, it seems to me, which needs this kind of scenery, if anything does. A Good Little Devil, on the other hand, would have benefited greatly by more imaginative treatment.

Gordon Craig, of course, would substitute suggestion for realism. He uses a combination of screens, occasional draperies, and little else, to gain his ends. The lighting is all from above; the natural lighting in this world. If your floors were made of glass under which were concealed hundreds of glaring electric lights, you would get the effect that footlights give on the stage.

It seems to me there are few romantic or poetic plays which would not be improved by Craig’s method of staging; and yet he has had little practical experience in putting on pieces. Sets of model scenes for Hamlet and Macbeth have been exhibited in London. I think Beerbohm Tree used adaptations of one of these at one time. Certainly Craig’s Hamlet was seen at Stanislawsky’s Theatre in Moscow. It is highly probable that Isadora Duncan’s dancing background is a fancy of Gordon Craig’s. However, little of the practical work of this man has reached the public, except through his books, which are verbose and vague except in spots; and through his conversation, which is usually said to be unillumined even by flashes.

Craig worked at Moscow for a considerable time, however, and it is probable that from the point of view of staging, Stanislawsky now leads the world. He has adopted some of Craig’s ideas and fitted them to others until he has obtained a formula for staging every play from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme to Hedda Gabler. This theatre is the direct antithesis of the Opéra-Comique in Paris, which has obtained such a false reputation for good staging.

The Opéra-Comique clings stolidly to the Italian method of using flimsy drops, with every detail carefully painted thereon, combined with plastic objects, the whole painted in pastel or primary colors in a manner to suggest a St. Valentine’s gift of the 1850 period. The lighting is usually excellent. There are no innovations to be looked for at the Opéra-Comique at present, which holds as fast to its traditions as if the Russian Ballet had never been seen in Paris.

Max Reinhardt and Leon Bakst have utilized Craig’s ideas in a measure, but they have altered them to a degree where they have become unrecognizable. Reinhardt is known in New York by Sumurun, one of his slightest productions. Still, it gives a good idea of his impressionistic use of flat surfaces to create atmosphere and a colorful background to his picture.

Leon Bakst, who has designed many of the famous ballets which the Russians give in Paris and other Continental cities from time to time, proceeds on a more lavish scale. There are no plastic features in a scene by Bakst. Everything is painted on flat canvas, but the barbaric gorgeousness, the impressionistic and suggestive qualities, appeal to the eye as no attempted copy of a real scene could ever do. The number of colors he uses in one scene is almost countless, and yet the combination is always thrilling and effective.