Continental stagecraft

by Kenneth Macgowan

To-day we are thinking more and more of the future of the theater, the future of the play and the playwright, the future of production, of direction and the actor.

If we are to think of the future to any effect, we must think of the past as well as the present. The path of to-morrow strikes off from the maze of to-day. To guess at its direction with much chance of success, we must look now and then at the map of the settled roads of yesterday.

If we want to estimate the chances of the non-realistic play to advance beyond its expressionist beginnings in Germany, we must try to understand the present state of the art of theatrical production, and the past of play and players, the theater and its stagecraft. A share of the future—a very large share, I believe—may lie with America; but the past is Continental. And a surprising amount of the past is German.

The past of the play shows one interesting peculiarity. The great plays of the romantic movement were developed where there were great theaters, in France and in Germany. Quite otherwise with Realism. Its greatest works—the plays of Ibsen and Strindberg—were created in small countries almost outside the consciousness of the nineteenth century theater. This was natural enough. Realistic plays were, in the last analysis, lonely literary rationalizations. They were not theatrical. They did not spring out of the theater. Instead they altered the theater to suit their needs. The theater that they altered most was the German theater, and there the dramas of the Scandinavians found their best audience.

But the German theater, being a healthy theater, could not stop at the point where it became an almost perfect mechanism for presenting these plays. Its directors and its artists went on experimenting. They had old plays to mount, also, plays out of the romantic and classic periods. They put their brains and their machines at work upon these pieces, as well as upon the realistic, and soon they had developed methods of production for non-realistic plays quite as admirable for the purpose as any of their tricks for lifting the fourth wall before our very eyes. The German theatrical organization became more and more restive under the realistic plays and the old “classics.” It was preparing for something new. The Zeitgeist was working. Soon it began to work upon the playwrights. There came abortive beginnings in the expressionist plays I have written about in the last chapter. And the German theater went on—and goes on—experimenting.

Let us look at this theater a little more closely. For it is the Continental theater to-day as it was yesterday; France has only Copeau, England experiments in little theaters as America experimented ten years ago. And where the Continental theater is, there we are very likely indeed to find the Continental play of the future. The expressionist drama, like every school of drama except the realistic, is a product of the theater in form and vitality, quite as much as it is a product of society in its mind and materials.

The story of the artistic development of the German theater past the realistic stage is familiar enough. It began in 1905, it was fairly complete by 1914. It was founded upon Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia, and it is symbolized in the name of Max Reinhardt. It made Realism still for Ibsen and Strindberg; but it plowed past the Realism of Otto Brahm—which is the Realism of Belasco—and it achieved a pregnant actuality so direct and simple that it soon gave birth to a new imagination.

The new methods of production are fairly easy to grasp. They rest on a few general principles. The pretenses of the theater had to be successful pretenses. To begin with, certain tricks of the old theater were forsworn, tricks in the main that failed to succeed. Such an obvious pretense as painted perspective had to go. Footlights had to be curbed; for the illumination must be both more natural and more beautiful. But, beyond these negative things, the directors sought to achieve positive effects for which they had to call into the theater artists of first-rate ability. The business of these artists, whether working on a realistic play or an imaginative one, was to evoke the atmosphere of the piece in setting and in lights. They fell back on three general principles to aid their sense of line and color in visually dramatizing the action. In the first place they simplified the stage picture. They subordinated or eliminated detail. They put as little as possible on the stage that might distract the spectator from the meaning of the general design (which was the meaning of the play), or from the actions and speeches of the characters. Then, by an adroit use of simple materials and forms, they enriched the setting—along the lines of the play—through suggestion. One detail suggested the nature of the whole. The base of a huge column made the audience visualize for itself the size of the building. Half an arch springing off into darkness created the impression of a great vaulted structure. Finally came a synthesis of all the available and appropriate forces of the theater, and of all the qualities of the play; this implying for the director the establishment of a certain apt rhythm in the performance.

This pictorial reform, backed by such direction and acting as the German theater alone was able to supply, and utilizing all manner of mechanical devices for scene-shifting and lighting, has stood to us for some ten years as the so-called new movement in the theater. It has been familiar through the names of Craig and Appia as pioneer theorists, of Reinhardt, and of artists like Ernst Stern and Alfred Roller; through an occasional production from abroad, like Reinhardt’s Sumurûn; and, at last, through the exceptional work of our own artists in America and the men—from Arthur Hopkins to directors of little theaters—who have given them their opportunities or amplified their conceptions.

Fringing the outside of all this in the past have been bastard minglings of old technique and new spirit, such as Bakst and the Ballets Russes displayed, and the beginnings of theory and experiment leading towards a new—or a very old—sort of theater, a theater cut off from the whole peep-hole convention of the proscenium and the fourth wall.