Der Schatzgräber: the cottage of the epilogue in Schrecker’s opera. An extreme conventionalization of the old scenic materials. The artist, Emil Pirchan, has indicated a cottage by the shape of the opening in the flat drop. Here, design replaces machinery in securing a quick change of scene.
There are peculiar disadvantages to these expensive mechanisms. The revolving stage simply can’t handle certain scenes without ceasing to be a revolving stage. It is impossible to use the entire width or depth of the stage for an exterior without shoving all the other scenes off the “revolver,” and giving up its use. All exterior scenes on the revolving stage have to go up over the rooms set at the back. The western prairies and the North German sea coast are equally unpopular with the friends of the revolving stage. The exceptionally fine production of Masse-Mensch—with its various great steps the whole width and half the height of the stage, alternating with flat open scenes—received almost no assistance from the “revolver” at the Volksbühne in Berlin. The technical director, putting this stage through its paces and exhibiting such amusing tricks as its ability to rise or sink some six feet at either end, thus producing a slanting floor, confessed that he much preferred some other type of stage.
The sliding and sinking stage has fewer disadvantages; but it is an elaborate, expensive, and cumbersome machine to do the work that designers and stage hands might quite as well accomplish. On the matter of expense, it is disquieting to hear at a scene-rehearsal of Das Rheingold that one hundred and fifty men, including electricians, are busy with this labor-saving device. It is still more disturbing to the machine-worshiper to time the intermissions in German theaters, and to find that waits of from two to five minutes are quite as frequent as in America. The explanation, of course, is the costumes. “The stage was all set in half a minute, but we had to wait for the tenor to get into his blue tights.” It looks very much as if the Maschineninspektoren should have introduced sliding wardrobes or adapted the harnessing devices of fire-houses before they put thousands of dollars into sliding stages.
The German technical men are beginning to chafe at the limitations of the machines, to be content to push them into second place. If you talk to Linnebach, at Dresden, once high priest of the sliding stage, you will note with some surprise that the word einfach has a Carolinian way of getting into the conversation. Things must be simpler. No big solid sets; instead, some curtains and lights and a dome on which to project painted designs. The word Podium also crops out. Like almost all forward-looking artists and directors in Germany, Linnebach wants to put the actor on a sort of tribune thrust out into the audience. He wants to give him back the vital heritage of the Greek and the medieval stages. Linnebach is content mechanically with the devices of the electrician; when he mounted Hasenclever’s expressionist drama, Jenseits, he made the setting out of light and shadow, a few chairs and tables, only one or two set pieces, and some projected backgrounds.
Machinery like the sinking stage has advantages apart from its ability to change heavy realistic sets. It is difficult to see how the opening scene of Shaw’s Pygmalion, looking out to the street from under the portico of Covent Garden, could be better created or more quickly shifted than in Linnebach’s production. Certainly without the ability to sink with ease the rear part of the stage three or four feet, he could not have given us the natural effect of the street level below the eyes of the audience and the actors. The great virtue of a mechanical stage of this kind is not to shift scenery, so much as to supply economically and quickly different levels for the actors to play upon. The use of levels is one of the important advances of the Continental theater since the war, and the sinking stage helps greatly with this. With a few inner prosceniums and simple backgrounds, it can supply, as it were, an infinite variety of formal stages such as the Continental theater seems slowly to be tending toward.
Das Rheingold: Alberich’s Cave. A setting by Linnebach and Pasetti at the National Theater in Munich. An atmospheric scene produced by lights playing across a frankly painted background which emphasizes the rocky converging lines of a cavern.
Barring the realistic and the formal, there is a middle ground in which the machine is of little value compared with the designer. In Linnebach’s theater—though not from his designs—a Hindu romance, Vasantasena, was mounted frankly and freshly against flat settings in the style of Indian miniatures. This was accomplished, without the aid of stage machinery, by the use of a permanent setting or portal of Indian design, with steps and a platform, on which, framed within an inner proscenium, drops and profiles were changed much as we would change them. The artist, Otto Hettner, supplied a style, as well as a formal stage, which made the machine taboo. Working with Pasetti at the National Theater in Munich, Linnebach accomplished the changes of Das Rheingold quite as easily. In an older production at Dresden, under Hasait, the fields of the gods opposite Valhalla were made of bulky platforms and plastic rocks, which went rolling back behind the cyclorama while up from the basement came in one piece the cave of the Nibelungen with its nooks and corners, its overhanging ceiling, and its whole equipment of plastic canvas rocks, which might have come out of some cavern on a scenic railway. In Munich the simpler levels of the fields in the second scene served in the cave scene also. They were lost in the shadows, along with the side walls, which were hardly more than masking curtains. The rocky cave was suggested wholly by the backdrop. This was painted in broken, converging lines of rock formations. Because of the magic of light, it did not seem like some conventional old backdrop.
The spirit of the theater as it has developed since the war seems to call upon the designer and régisseur instead of the mechanician. When artists were building heavy and cumbersome settings, elaborate in physical proportions if not in design, sliding and revolving stages were unquestionably necessary, though we may well ask how much the presence of the mechanisms tempted the artists into such excess. To-day, however, the setting is being stylized, the stage itself made formal. Machinery becomes irrelevant. Copeau does not need it even for the realistic Les Frères Karamazov; the Redoutensaal is almost too innocent to suspect its existence. Régisseurs of the new sort want something more theatrical than a turntable that any round-house might boast.