Continental stagecraft

by Kenneth Macgowan

The Palace: a setting by Hans Strohbach for Der Traum, ein Leben, a fantasy by Calderon. Columns of dull gold, painted to suggest a spiral shape, are spaced against a black curtain, which is later drawn aside to reveal a blood-red sky. In the foreground a group of plotting Orientals.

The strength of this movement in Germany lay partly in a very few talented directors like Reinhardt and artists like Stern, but very greatly in the vigorous and healthy organization of the German theater. Because of the division of Germany in small kingdoms and duchies, there had always been many centers of artistic life, each about a court in the capital. In a score of cities, enriched by industrial development, there were theaters endowed by the state or the city, and directed towards the highest artistic accomplishment. In the larger cities privately owned theaters followed the lead of the public institutions. The strength of these houses lay in their endowment, their ideals, and their system of organization. This was the repertory system. Here, as nowhere in England or America and only here or there in France, were theaters directed by a single mind, employing a permanent company of players, maintaining a repertory of plays, old and new, given in recurring succession night after night, theaters retaining therefore a permanent audience, dependable both in pocketbook and in taste. Supplementing these theaters were organizations of playgoers among the middle and lower classes, such as the Freie Volksbühne in Berlin, which widened the audience of subscribers to good work in the theater. Between endowment and the security of a permanent audience, it was possible for these German theaters to give uncommonly fine performances at uncommonly low prices.

Along with the development of new methods in production went a good deal of activity in theater building. In practice, as well as in theory, Max Littmann and Oskar Kaufmann, following Schinkel and Semper, who had worked with Goethe and Wagner, did much to improve the auditoriums of German theaters. The result is not so marked as in the case of the scenic artists. Most of the theaters are old indeed and awkwardly shaped, and too many of the new ones continue the tradition of a parquet surrounded and surmounted by three or four shallow, horseshoe-shaped balconies. These balconies are not so good to see or hear from as our own. A realization of the awkwardness of these shelves or Rangen, as they are termed in German, produced an opposition, headed by Littmann, that called for their elimination and for the substitution of an amphitheater type of house with no balconies and with a steeper floor to allow of better sight-lines. The fight of Ring vs. Rang has resulted in several auditoriums designed by Littmann, the Prinzregenten Theater and the Künstler, for example, in Munich, the slant of whose floors is far too sharp; from the upper rows, the players are seen as in some far-off pit. The slant is greater than necessary, and absolutely straight; the practice of the American architect, H. C. Ingalls, of grading the floor in a gradually increasing curve, produces a far better effect. A compromise between Rang and Ring might be found in a development of the American house with only one balcony; a more steeply slanting floor than we ordinarily have would thus bring two amphitheaters or Rings into a single auditorium. Germany possesses, however, some admirable playhouses in the Kammerspielhaus formerly directed by Reinhardt in Berlin, in the Volksbühne designed by Oskar Kaufmann, and in many features of the Künstler Theater. The seating arrangements have formed one of the best features of the German houses. The chairs are almost always too thinly padded; but the elimination of aisles more than compensates. The whole audience is united in a single responsive body. And because each row is a little wider than ours and the side walls of the auditoriums are liberally supplied with doors, the audience empties out more quickly than ours and in an orderly manner that puts American fire-regulations to shame. I have seen the three thousand spectators of the Volksbühne walk out in a single minute. It takes from three to four for a small theater in New York, seating only six hundred, to clear itself.

A factor that has done a great deal for the progress of the German theater and the reputation of the new stagecraft, is the liberal attitude of the German periodicals and publishing houses towards new things in the theater. Editors and writers have been so eager to present to the public every smallest reform in setting or theater that the world has gained rather an optimistic view of the extent of production progress in Germany. Just as it is a fact that only in a few theaters will you find model auditoriums in Central Europe, in a similar way you discover that the outstanding work of design before the war was done by two men, Stern and Roller, and that the other men whose names decorate the records of the new stagecraft were each responsible for only a few productions.

One thing further you may learn about the past of the German movement, even in an investigation so late as the summer of 1922. And that is that the color in a great majority of the stage settings has been very far from good. The German has an ear, a very marvelous ear; only the Russian can approach him in music, and it is not a near approach. But his eye is bad. Germany has produced no first-rate artists except Dürer, Schongauer and perhaps Cranach, and Dürer and Schongauer are celebrated as etchers rather than as painters. That should have been caution enough for those of us who had to study the German stage at the distance of the half-tone. The fact of the matter is that the German is a splendid theorist, a man of large conceptions, and that therefore in the theater he has been able to design settings of simple and excellent proportions, which create a good effect in black-and-white. It is his sense of color that is at fault. Stern, with the mixture of the Oriental in his blood which did so much for Bakst, and some of the artists from Vienna and the South brought something to the stage besides dramatic imagination and sense of proportion. The test of color downs the rest.

When we think of the future of the German theater we must naturally think of the present also, and it is a black present. Germany has been shattered spiritually as well as economically. It has fallen from dreams of world-dominion to bankruptcy and enslavement. The effect of this upon the mind of the citizen who has come through four years of danger and privation, is staggering. One incident of the fall, which you learn upon visiting Germany, is sharply significant. Until the soldiers from the broken German armies began to stream back into the Rhine provinces in November, 1918, the men and women behind the front believed that their forces were victorious. It is possible for the theater to go on physically under almost any conditions of privation; but you must reckon spiritually with an extraordinary state of the public mind when you prophesy the future of the German theater. Two things, perhaps, make optimism possible. One: Germany and the German people have gone through terrible things before; there was the Thirty Years War. Two: Germany still has the wonderfully trained audience of pre-war days; it was a broad democratic audience, and no shift in economic circumstances can destroy so large a part of the cultured playgoers as war-poverty has done in England, in France, and even to some extent in America.

War—backed by the movies—has done its worst in the Berlin theater. Here we find another example of the exchange of ideals and personalities which has often been noted between victor and vanquished. Just as America has been Prussianized in its attitude towards the foreigner and the liberal or radical minority, Berlin has adopted many of the most evil features of the American theatrical system. Within three years of the close of hostilities Berlin was being rapidly Broadway-ized. Repertory was practically dead at all but three or four theaters. Facing economic difficulties and the competition of the movies for the services of the actors, Berlin found it was a large enough city to support long runs for exceptionally great or exceptionally mediocre plays. Even the three theaters that Reinhardt formerly directed broke from repertory, and where they had once shown ten or a dozen productions in two weeks, they showed only three or (counting Sunday matinees of some old favorites) four. Outside Berlin, repertory continues in the State and City theaters and even in private ventures; but many artistic playhouses are badly crippled by the economic troubles of the nation, and some are forced to close down.

There are certain good signs. The theaters were full in 1922. In fifty or sixty visits to the theater it was only at musical comedies that I saw more than one row of vacant seats; in all but half a dozen cases every seat was sold and occupied. The prices were not high. In Frankfort, an average city of the larger size, the highest prices ranged from sixty marks (at that time twenty cents) to one hundred and twenty marks, depending on the expensiveness or the popularity of the production; while the lowest prices for seats were twenty marks to seventy marks, with standing room at six marks.

At such prices even full houses do not make budgets easy to balance. The theater of post-war Germany must be economical in its expenditures. That is not, however, such an artistic hardship as much of the talk of elaborate machinery and handsome productions in pre-war days might suggest. Rigorous physical simplicity and a reliance on the genius of design instead of elaboration of mechanics are the vital needs in stage setting to-day. Germany has done fine things in the simplifying of production, and it has done them in spite of the temptations of bulging pocketbooks. What it may be forced to do now through poverty is a matter for real hope.