As for the cloud-machine, so long as it is trying merely to reproduce nature it is utterly unimportant. Something imaginative must be done with it before it can expect serious consideration. In the productions of André at the Stockholm Opera there are at least two hints that the cloud-machine can be used for the purposes of art. One of these, rather poorly managed, is the use of designed clouds instead of natural clouds in one of the scenes of Samson and Delilah. The other, not perfectly executed by any means, but most suggestive, occurs in Verdi’s Macbeth. There in the first scene André sets a wild storm sky in motion. He uses negative or black photographs of clouds instead of positive or white, and he starts them moving from on high and at the sides, sweeping in and down upon the witches. As these dark shapes descend in tumult, it seems as though the black earth were drinking black clouds, curious and evil portent of the powers of the infernal.
Movement in projection has obviously great possibilities as part of the action of new drama. In Kaiser’s expressionist play From Morn to Midnight, produced by the Theater Guild, Simonson used Linnebach’s lantern to make the tree in the snow scene change into a skeleton, an effect that Kaiser was able to foresee only as a shifting of snowflakes upon naked boughs.
Light itself seems destined to assume a larger and larger part in the drama. It is a playing force, quite as much as the actors. It can be a motivator of action as well as an illuminator of it. Jessner at the State Schauspielhaus in Berlin uses it as an arbitrary accompaniment and interpreter of action. Lights flash on or off as some mood changes. They create shadows to dramatize a relation of two men. They seem to control or to be controlled by the action. The extent to which a change of light may express the dramatist’s conception is most interestingly suggested in the scene of Macbeth’s death in André’s production of the opera. It is an uncommonly well handled scene in all respects, perhaps the best example of this director’s fine imagination. The fight between the armies begins in a gray light before the walls of Dunsinane. There is no absurd effort of supers to look like death-crazed warriors. The quality of pursuit and conflict is caught in the pose of the bands of the soldiers as they run past the walls bent down like dogs upon a blood-scent. Macbeth and Macduff meet for a clear moment of conflict, then they are surrounded and covered by the troops that rush to see their champions do battle. At the moment when Macbeth falls, the crowd clears for a moment. And then the grayness of morning breaks sharply into dawn as evil goes out of the play. An obvious symbolism, perhaps, but obviousness is not so great a failing in the theater. The fault of the scene is only in André’s over-emphasis upon the light, or rather his under-emphasis upon the cause of the light—the death of Macbeth. At the moment when the light goes on, there should come some supreme, arresting gesture, something to absorb every atom of our attention so that we may wonderingly discover the light as a thing caused by Macbeth, not by an electrician.
Such a scene suggests wide possibilities. Light as the compelling force of a play; light as a motivator of action; light and setting, not as a background to action, but as part of it, as something making characters exist and act; light as an almost physical aura of human bodies; light, therefore, in conflict. Physical contacts are not a necessity of the theater. Under Jessner, the murderer of Clarence in Richard III does not try to seem to stab him; he simply plunges the dagger at him. That is enough. In Francesca da Rimini as Duse sometimes gave it, I have heard that when the husband killed Paola with his sword the space of the whole room separated them. It was as if the sword possessed an aura, and as if the aura slew. In Masse-Mensch the crowd of revolutionaries go down to the mere rattle of machine guns before the curtains are drawn to show the soldiers.
If light can do such things, even if it can do no more than signal the downfall of evil or set Valhalla glowing in the heavens, it will take a place in the theater that no other product of inventive ingenuity can reach. Light, at the very least, is machinery spiritualized.
CHAPTER VII
THE GERMAN ACTOR
Four years of war left the elaborate machinery of the German theaters intact. Four years of the purgatory called peace have even seen a sharp advance in electrical equipment. Critics and managers of the victorious nations and of the neutrals that enjoy a sound exchange may complain of the quantity and quality of theater-goers; but the vanquished have suffered less. At forty performances in Germany and Austria we saw hardly two rows of vacant seats all told in the dramatic theaters, though one or two musical shows were no more than two-thirds full.
The German theater has suffered, however, in one spot. The unfortunate truth is that it is a vital spot—acting. Only the richness of trained talent in its post-war companies enables it to suffer the drain of the past years and still give performances far better than we see in England or America.
War affected the German actor less than it did the actor in the allied countries; Germany kept her players on the home front fighting disheartenment. Peace and the movies, however, brought dispersal. Companies were scattered, players exiled. The spectacular collapse, of course, was the dissolution of Max Reinhardt’s famous company that filled his two Berlin theaters. Moissi, Bassermann, Pallenberg, Konstantin, Eibenschütz, Wegener, Dietrich, Arnold, Lehman, Eysoldt, Bertens, Diegelmann, Heims, Jannings, Schildkraut—not one of these names appears on the Zettel outside the old Reinhardt houses. Some are in the movies and some are stars, but all are gone.
If American films could have entered Germany in the face of the depreciated mark, Reinhardt’s theaters might still be giving true repertory, Reinhardt himself might still be there, and certainly many of the old company would be playing together in Berlin. Other factors, personal, financial, and artistic, gradually drew Reinhardt out of production, but he himself declared with much truth that repertory was impossible when actors had to give their days to the movies, instead of to rehearsals, and that the theater was impossible for him without repertory and actors. As for the players themselves, with the mark at a cent and pomade at two hundred marks, it had to be either the movies or stardom.