The playwright works with the régisseur and the artist to this same end. While Dorothy Richardson, Waldo Frank, and James Joyce are busy taking the machinery out of the novel, the playwrights are making machinery unnecessary for drama. They drop “atmosphere,” and take up the soul. They seek the subjective instead of the physical. They want to thrill us with the mysteries and clarities of the unconscious, instead of cozening us with photographic detail or romantic color. For all this they need imagination in setting, not actuality. Form carries the spirit up and out. Indications speak to it louder than actualities. Design, which is of the spirit, drives out mechanism, which is of the brain.
The day of the machine is over in the theater, the day of its domination at any rate. For a time it looked as though the name of the old theater in the Tuileries would have to be painted over every stage door in Germany—La Salle des Machines. Now the stage machine is sinking into its proper place—the cellar. A new device is lording it in the theater, but it cannot be called a machine. The electric light is not a mechanical thing. It is miraculously animated by something very like the Life Force, and night by night its living rays are directed to new and unforeseen ends.
CHAPTER VI
LIGHT AS SETTING
In the ’eighties and the ’nineties, when electricity came into the theater to take the place of gas, light was only illumination. By the first decade of the twentieth century it had become atmosphere. To-day it is taking the place of setting in many Continental theaters. To-morrow it may be part of drama itself.
In 1893 a Swiss doctor named Adolphe Appia published a little book in French on the production of Wagner’s music-dramas; six years later he elaborated his ideas in a volume published in a German translation as Die Musik und die Inscenierung, the first and perhaps the greatest book of theory on the new art of the theater. Among other things, he discussed lighting at great length. He made a very important observation. He noted that the lighting of the stage of his day was hardly more than mere illumination—something to make all objects equally bright and visible. It was quite as necessary, he believed, to make certain objects more visible than others, and to make them more living, more dramatic. At the time the lighting apparatus of the theater was crude, because the electric light was in its infancy. There were only small electric bulbs, arranged in rows for footlights below and borderlights overhead, to supply flat illumination, and arc lights, which were movable and could be made to “spot” out figures more brilliantly. Appia recognized in these last the means for making the figure of the actor brilliant and dynamic. With his eye on these spotlights he made an unheard-of demand. He asked for shadows. He said that light and shade gave three dimensions to the player and three dimensions to the setting (provided, as he suggested, the setting be made plastic instead of flat). By means of light he wanted to link the living actor and the dead setting. He went further than using shadows and animating the background. He proposed that the play of light throughout an act should express the mood and action. He wanted it to change with the development of the play. He made elaborate analyses of the Wagner music-dramas to show how the light could play a part—an active part—in the setting and the action.
During the next decade, the beginning of the twentieth century, an Italian named Fortuny began the first practical work of progress in stage lighting. Not very permanent work, perhaps, but certainly valuable because it struck out in new directions. His devices have all but disappeared from the German theater; but only because they have been replaced by improvements along the lines he indicated. Fortuny tried to improve the quality of the light by using indirect illumination. He threw light from powerful arcs against colored bands of silk, which reflected it onto the stage. This had two advantages. The light was diffused and broken up. The color could be controlled at a distance by cords that moved the various silk bands past the light. Fortuny also tried to improve the surface on which the light fell. He devised a domed silk sky or Kuppelhorizont, into which the greater part of his diffused light was thrown, to be diffused still further. Incidentally he hoped to achieve a better sky-effect. Disadvantages hampered both his devices. Indirect lighting required far more current than direct and created a great deal of heat. The dome was produced by exhausting air from between two curved surfaces of silk, the outer one fastened to a folding frame of steel; creases and joints showed in the silk and air was likely to leak in and collapse the sky.
In the course of another ten years engineering ingenuity supplied substitutes for both these elements of the Fortuny System. Most important was the discovery of how to manufacture incandescent bulbs almost as powerful as arc lights. Such bulbs, equipped with frosted glass and glass mediums or color screens, could not only supply light sufficiently diffused in tone and under easy control, but they also produced the shadows, as well as the light, which Appia wanted. The sky-dome became literally a fixture in the German theater when some one decided to make it out of plaster instead of silk. To-day the high-powered bulb and the plaster sky are everywhere in the German theater. Schwabe in Berlin and Phillips in Holland have succeeded in making bulbs of the enormous power of 3,000 watts or 6,000 candle-power, bulbs about three times as strong as any incandescent lights used in America in 1922. The dome, or some variety of it, is found in practically every German theater. Linnebach estimates that there are twenty true Kuppelhorizonts, cupping the whole stage with a curving dome; ten permanent Rundhorizonts, plaster cycloramas curving like a great semi-circular wall around the stage; and thirty canvas cycloramas which are quite as large as the Rundhorizont, and some of which are so hung as to make a most convenient and efficient substitute for either variety of plaster sky.
The most interesting and significant departures in the use of light on the Continental stage have to do with this substitute for the old backdrop. It began as an imitation of the sky, an attempt to put one more piece of Realism into the theater. It has got to the point now where its really interesting and important uses have nothing whatever to do with realistic fake-heavens. It is being employed as a formal element in a stage design, or else as a surface on which to paint scenery with light.
Perhaps it was economy, perhaps a flash of genius, but it occurred to the Germans that there was no particular necessity of lighting the dome or cyclorama. In these huge stages it stands at least sixty or seventy feet back of the footlights. It is possible, therefore, to make it a dim emptiness by merely turning off the lights that ordinarily shine upon it, or to give it some vague neutral quality from the light upon the stage which is reflected onto the Horizont. In Othello at the State Schauspielhaus in Berlin, Jessner uses his cyclorama, an ordinary canvas one, as a formal background bounding the space in which his strictly conventionalized indications of settings are placed. Thus it is in some scenes a pale neutral wall, in some a curious violet emptiness, in others a faintly salmon background, in still another a yellow light against which figures move in tiny silhouettes. At the Volksbühne in Masse-Mensch the dome becomes a misty void in one of the dream-scenes; and then upon this void move vast, mysterious shadows in circling procession.
Shadows on the dome carry us to a final development of lighting in Germany—the “projection” of scenery, the substitution of light for paint as a means of expression. Many minds have worked and are working on devices to be used for this purpose, but the most important mechanisms find their home in Dresden at the theaters of Linnebach and of Hasait.