The danger—for there is a danger—is that smaller minds may find an excuse for a mean sort of simplicity, a bareness and barrenness of spirit. There has always been a tendency among the modern directors and designers to economize spiritually as well as economically. The results have been seen in some of our dry, meager “little theater” productions, full of bare formalism—a sort of “simplism” that has no place in any art, let alone in the live, varied, rich, and vigorous theater. Occasionally a German artist of real talent falls into this thin manner; Ludwig Sievert has mounted Towards Damascus at the Frankfort Schauspielhaus upon a scheme which is physically interesting, but he has given his settings a mean, arid, spiritually poverty-stricken appearance which is never beautiful, and does not express in the least the intense quality of Strindberg’s play.
The movies break up ensemble in Germany, and bear down on repertory. They offer salaries that the actor, impoverished quite as much as the worker, cannot resist. Moreover they demand from him the daylight hours which must be given to rehearsals of old and new pieces if repertory is to exist. The German actor cannot appear in a repertory theater in the evenings, as our actor can appear upon Broadway, and put in his days in front of the camera, as ours often does. But—and this is highly important—the German actor has been trained in a school of ideals and self-expression which makes him demand more than the movies can give him. He must have some sort of serious work in the theater, and he is finding it more and more in special summer engagements or Festspiele. Thus many of the greatest of the nation’s players are often assembled at salaries which, by comparison with their motion picture earnings, are hardly salaries at all.
There remains the spirit of the German people. The audiences are intact and intelligent, but what about their spirit? Can these people live down their sufferings or lift them up to something great outside themselves? The prospect is not so dark in the southern parts, in Bavaria, perhaps; it is certainly bright in Austria, where hunger and economic misery are the realest and where the divinity of the human spirit is asserted again and again in every happy gesture of this lovely people. In Berlin it is another matter. Spiritual dejection and gnawing misery are in the face of every one. They are to be seen on the stage, too. Berlin does not go to the theater to be taken out of itself; it seems to neglect the prime use of art. Berlin demands an echoing misery from its playhouses. It goes to see a blacker and more despicable Richard III than Shakespeare ever imagined. It suffers the torments of disillusioned revolution in Masse-Mensch at the working people’s theater. It throngs the glowering caverns of the Grosses Schauspielhaus. And everywhere the stage is hung in black curtains. “Warum immer die schwarzen Vorhänge?” we ask again and again. Perhaps they are only an accident of the attempt to get a background of emptiness; but they become a yawning gulf of spiritual blackness. The only colors to break the pall are the red of blood, and the blue that strikes across the black a symbol of a sinister cruelty.
Of course, black curtains are no Teuton monopoly. When the Russian Pitoëff uses them in Paris, when we see them on Broadway and in our “little theaters,” we do not look for the words “Made in Germany” on the selvage. But in Germany they seem numerous and more significant. If the curtains were sometimes dappled with gray or if they were opalescent with hidden lights, they might be significant of nothing more than the Germans’ immensely active experiments with a formal stage. Perhaps bunte Vorhänge are coming. Perhaps it is always a little dark before dawn.
CHAPTER V
THE TWILIGHT OF THE MACHINES
There are many things upon the German stage besides black dawn. The twilight of the machines, for instance, and all the past of the new stagecraft lagging superfluous.
Even the past of the old stagecraft. In the same theater in Frankfort where one of the three significant pairs of German directors and artists labors, I have seen Peer Gynt given as incompetently as any patron of an American small-town stock company could demand. The settings were hideous; the same badly painted backdrop served for two or three scenes in different localities; the revolving stage rumbled noisily and did nothing to shorten intermissions. While the orchestra played Grieg’s introductory music in the wings and the stage was dark, waiting actors, who imagined that thereby ears as well as eyes were dimmed, restlessly shifted from one foot to another in squeaky shoes. At the beginning of each scene the lights came up like thunder. Through as many scenes as could be endured, the same players who gave a sharp, almost electric performance of Maria Stuart the next night, acted Peer Gynt dully and sloppily to a running fire of assistance from the prompter’s box. It is worth remarking, incidentally, that the souffleur, as he is euphemistically called, is no necessity in the repertory theater. He may give a complete and studied reading of the text one lap ahead of the actors in the Grosses Schauspielhaus, the Frankfort Schauspielhaus, the Burgtheater in Vienna, the Lessing Theater in Berlin, and a dozen other first-class theaters; but you don’t hear his voice in the State Schauspielhaus of Berlin under Jessner, in Copeau’s Vieux-Colombier in Paris, or during a performance of Masse-Mensch at the Volksbühne.
The sleep-walking scene from Macbeth as produced by Harald André at the Royal Opera in Stockholm. Moonlight slants down through four tall windows making alternate bars of light and shadow, through which moves the white-robed figure of Lady Macbeth. The Doctor and the Gentlewoman are half-hidden at one side in the darkness of the foreground.
The past of the German stage is seldom slovenly, but it is often disturbing. To see in 1922 a setting by Roller for Die Meistersinger is like encountering at a fashionable New York thé dansant the girl you used to take to high school dances in St. Louis in 1907. The German stage is full of such disquieting reminders of juvenile infatuations; Sweden is not exempt. The work of the pioneers and imitations of the work of the pioneers are still to be seen. Verdi’s Macbeth à la Craig at the Stockholm Opera; The Sunken Bell at the Grosses Schauspielhaus with Stern’s hill from Penthesilea; Reinhardt effects in Maria Stuart in Frankfort; good old Russian painting in faked perspective in Florian Geyer in Munich; a wedding of Heinrich Leffler and Maxfield Parrish at Dresden in the Verdi opera which the Germans so cheerfully translate as Der Troubadour; the style, if you can call it that, of the Washington Square Players in Towards Damascus in Frankfort. Everywhere traces of Reinhardt and Craig and Roller.