There seems to be a certain hard, uncompromising insistence in all German acting. It is a thing, perhaps, of narrow spirit and deep intensity. It has unquestioned vitality. In Grabbe’s old drama, Napoleon, which Jessner gives at the State Schauspielhaus in Berlin, this vitality leaps to union most happily with the intoxication that Bonaparte spread about him always, and never more extraordinarily than in the Hundred Days which this play chronicles. It is all vitality, the impatient vitality of the soldiers of Wolfgang Heinz and Lothar Müthel, who await Napoleon’s return, the besotted and sinister vitality of the new mob of the carmagnole, the energizing vitality of Rudolf Forster’s Wellington, the sober, slow but potent vitality of Arthur Krauszneck’s Blücher, and that font of indomitable self-assertion Napoleon himself, played by Ludwig Hartau. Even the old Humpty-Dumpty Louis of Leopold von Ledebur, and the courtiers who prop him up on his throne take on a certain fixity of purpose—perhaps a deathly fixity—from the vitality flowing round them.
In other performances of Jessner’s company this vitality flows over into mere vigor, even into violence. That is the besetting sin of the German actor. Fritz Kortner, celebrated for his Richard III and his Othello, ranges from unnatural suppression of feeling, from studied and almost whispered restraint, to mad screechings. An almost neurotic violence crops up somewhere in every other performance in Germany. Even the women fall into it. Gerda Müller’s Elizabeth, after an evening of excellent, mastered power, breaks out into the hoarse-voiced raving that seems more a mark of the male players. Sudden spurts of laying it on too thick appear in some of the secondary players of Florian Geyer. The comic villain of Vasantasena plays the whole thing in a knot of petty passion. It is ranting, this sort of thing, no matter how far it may be from the orotund mouthings of our old-school players, no matter how much sharp characterization and genuine passion may be forced into it.
The performance of Masse-Mensch at the Volksbühne in Berlin stands out because it manages to carry intensity of feeling to a point just short of violence, and then, with every excuse provided in this desperate story of thwarted revolution, to bring it up short at the right moment into high-pitched but beautiful vehemence. The outstanding impression must be the astounding diction of the mob that speaks clearly, rhythmically, and most movingly with a single common voice; it gives you a sudden vision of what the Greek chorus may have been, and why thirty thousand people listened. But the power of Mary Dietrich as the Christ-figured, Christ-tortured woman is almost as unforgettable.
Looking back across these forty-odd performances, I find that a very simple and very brief bit of acting stands out as sharply as any. It is the quiet, sadly amusing, little Buddhist priest in Vasantasena as played by Erich Ponto. It is not a thing the German stage often discloses, this delicate mingling of humor and reverence. If it were, the people from Moscow who played The Cherry Orchard would not have seemed to come from the one land where acting is a rounded and tempered perfection.
CHAPTER VIII
NEW ACTING FOR OLD
Acting is the oldest thing in the theater. It comes before the play, because in the beginning the actor and the playwright are one. Drama originates when two or three people are seized with a desire to give an old legend or an old ritual a living form. They want to act. As they act they make up their play. The theater becomes the spot that seems a good place—either spiritually, physically, or by force of tradition—in which to give the play. In time comes a division of labor. One of the actors begins to specialize on the play. This actor studies how he can develop the form of the play to make better use of the theater; and then, with some leader among the actors, he begins to speculate on how to change the theater in order to give more scope to the playwright and to the player who interprets him.
That is the history of the theater through twenty-five centuries. It begins with the actor, and it comes very close to ending with him.
It is rather a good thing to understand about the history of the theater. It gives you a certain respect for the actor which actors do not always inspire. It makes you patient with the difficulties of writing anything intelligible on this most ancient and most complex and most unsubstantial of all the things of the theater. It makes you realize the dangers of dogmatizing on the subject. And, if you can look back with imagination to the day of Garrick and his great apron stage and his Hamlet in knickerbockers, back to the day of Burbage and his sunlit platform in the midst of an Elizabethan mob, back to Æschylus answering the chorus of the Furies in the half circle of Athenians that piled up the hillside of the Acropolis; perhaps, then, you will see that the actor was not always a fellow with a false beard or the manners of a soda water clerk, who expects you to believe that he is no actor at all, but a family doctor or an employee of Mr. Liggett who has taken to living in a room with one side gone. At any rate a little hint of theatrical history, full of amazing surprises, might make you tolerant of such speculations as the following on the four types of acting to be seen in the theater to-day and on what is to come of them.
The art of acting is a miscellaneous sort of art. I imagine that types of acting which we think very new and modern were to be found in every age except the first. Probably some famous Greek comedian made his entrance in The Frogs looking so amazingly like the statue of Herakles on the Acropolis that for half a minute nobody could be sure that this was really the actor whom they had expected to see. In Shakespeare’s day it is not unlikely that the man who played Caliban got together a collection of false hair and wooden tusks which made every one wonder who the new member of the company could be. And probably among the Greeks and the Elizabethans there were players so amazingly like servants or kings in face and carriage that they never played anything else. Yet it is safe to say, nevertheless, that the actor’s trick of trying to look like a different human being in each new play and never at all like himself, and his other trick of never looking like anything but himself and always playing exactly the same kind of part, are histrionic symptoms of the disease called Realism. There was never so much literal and deliberate impersonation as in Europe to-day, and so much “type casting” as along Broadway.
These are two very different methods of work, but they both reach the same end—absolute resemblance—and neither has necessarily anything to do with art. The first—for which the word “impersonation” is commonly and very loosely used—is pretty generally esteemed to-day. It is considered to mark off the actor, even the artist, from the crowd of clever mummers. It is hard to deny an instant and hearty interest in any player who can look like and act like a tramp one night, and like a barbaric king the next. The emotion he creates as a king, or the artist’s vision he displays in selecting his material and making Form out of it, may be great or small. But his ingenuity in masquerade will always win admiration. In fact we are pretty sure to spend our time praising such an actor as Ben-Ami for looking like a neurotic artist in Samson and Delilah, and like a husky young horse-thief in The Idle Inn, instead of recognizing the artistic distinction these impersonations show.